We have measured the effect of a depolarizing field on the properties of a ferroelectric capacitor. By systematically adjusting the amount of charge available to compensate the polarization, we can control the strength of the field inside the ferroelectric. We find that even a few percent of uncompensated polarization charge results in a significant suppression of measured ferroelectric properties, and a complete lack of compensating charge leaves a greatly reduced, although nonzero, polarization. The effect of a depolarizing field is briefly discussed in terms of proposed ferroelectric device applications.

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A rotating magnet dc planar magnetron with a 33-cm diameter aluminum target is coupled with a secondary plasma source to ionize the sputtered metal neutral flux to control the angular distribution of the flux arriving at the surface of the substrate. For this purpose, a radio-frequency ͑rf͒ plasma is created between the sputtering target and substrate by a three-turn coil located in the vacuum chamber. The rf plasma increases the electron temperature and density, which results in significant ionization of the neutral metal flux from the sputtering target. By applying a small negative bias to the substrate, metal ions are drawn to the substrate at normal incidence. A gridded energy analyzer and a quartz crystal microbalance ͑QCM͒ were used to determine the ion and neutral deposition rates. From this, the ionization fraction of the flux incident onto the QCM is determined.

Superconducting thin films of YBaCuO have been formed using rapid thermal annealing of Cu/BaO/Y2 O3 layered structures, which were deposited on MgO substrates by electron beam evaporation. The best film has an onset temperature of 94 K and zero resistance at 84 K. The dependence of the film characteristics and superconducting transition temperature on the annealing conditions has been studied. Auger depth profiling was used to examine the interdiffusion between the film and the MgO substrate.

Increasing circuit densities produce higher metal wiring aspect ratios, and more difficult feature fill for damascene processing. One method of extending the use of sputter deposition to challenging aspect ratios is to collimate the sputtered flux using a collimator plate, and to avoid randomizing the collimated flux by using low process pressures corresponding to long sputtered atom mean free paths. In this paper, we discuss our fabrication of damascene AI-0.5Cu-2Si and AI-2Mg wiring using both collimated and uncollimated sputtering, and our observations of collimation-induced changes in Al alloy electromigration and microstructure. Our experiments show that collimation has only a small effect on AlCuSi, but a large effect on AIMg. Specifically, the median time to electromigration failure for collimated AIMg was ∼10X the value for uncollimated AlMg and ∼6X the values for collimated and uncollimated AlCuSi. Transmission electron microscope and x-ray diffraction analyses of these films show that the collimation-induced improvement in AIMg t50 is associated with the formation of smaller, lower strain grains which are clustered in very well-oriented (111) domains. We propose that the advantageous AlMg microstructure results from enhanced texture produced by aspects of the collimated deposition active in the absence of incoherent precipitates.