Thermal stability of sputtered zirconium oxide films

Determination of Optical Properties of Thin Films from Ketteler-Helmholtz Dispersion Relations: Application to the Case of Ultraviolet Irradiated Zirconium Oxide

“…During heating, the sample is sited flat on a thick glass plate in the oven. The samples were exposed for one hour to a temperature of 100 ∘ C. Incidentally, previous studies [7,19,24,37,39] have shown that the phase morphology of the as-deposited zirconium oxide films is monoclinic when deposited by magnetron sputtering at room temperature. The monoclinic phase is known to be stable up to 1,170 ∘ C. Then, the present low annealing temperature is well below the temperature needed to obtain the first phase transition from monoclinic to tetragonal phase.…”

“…Sputtering deposition is a widely used technique which offers several advantages over other methods: high deposition rates; dense defect-free oxide films; not requiring high temperature; the fact that films have a composition close to that of the source material; the fact that high melting point materials are easily sputtered; sputtering usually leading to less contamination than evaporation methods; the fact that sputtered films have a good adhesion on the substrate; the fact that it can also be performed top-down. Due to its ability to reduce arcing during the reactive process, pulsed direct current magnetron sputtering is a valuable version of the sputtering technique [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

The Properties of RF Sputtered Zirconium Oxide Thin Films at Different Plasma Gas Ratio

“…3 In addition, ZrO2 thin films have been considered to replace SiO2 due to their high k dielectric property in the metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor. 4 These applications have led to various techniques to synthesize zirconium oxide thin films including direct current reactive magnetron sputtering, 5,6 chemical vapor deposition, 7,8 sol-gel techniques, 2,9 pulsed ion beam evaporation, 10 liquid phase deposition, 11 and filtered cathodic vacuum arc. 12 Radio frequency (RF) reactive magnetron sputtering is a widely used technique which is affected by several deposition conditions, such as the RF power, mixing ratio of plasma gas, and substrate temperature etc.…”

Effect of annealing on pulsed laser deposited zirconium oxide thin films

“…Values as low as 1.91 [12] and as large as 2.22 [6] were reported for the refractive index of ZrO 2 thin films at = 550 nm. Moreover, some studies showed that the refractive index decreased upon annealing [9,32], whereas others showed an increase of the refractive index upon annealing [5,12]. This wide variation reflects the critical dependence of the optical constants on the deposition technique, thickness, treatment (plasma or bias), annealing temperature and atmosphere, and the analytical technique (ellipsometry or spectrophotometry) used to derive the optical constants.…”