Abstract. Different nitrides such as titanium nitride, chromium nitride and so on are used in a widespread range of applications such as cutting tools, medical implants, and microelectromechanical devices and all that due to their mechanical, physical and chemical properties. The aim of this study is to obtain chromium nitride thin films and to characterize them by atomic force microscopy investigations. The chromium nitride thin films were deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering on silicon substrates. During the deposition process, the discharge current, the argon and nitrogen flows, the pressure inside the chamber and the deposition time were kept constant. A chromium target with a purity of 99.95 % was used. Some of the films were deposited after a chromium buffer layer was previously deposited on the silicon substrate. The deposition was carried out when substrate temperature was at room temperature, at 300 and 500 °C respectively. Once the films were deposited, atomic force microscopy investigations were performed in order to emphasize the influence of the substrate temperature on the topographical, mechanical and tribological characteristics. The results pointed out an important influence of the substrate temperature on topographical, mechanical and tribological properties of the investigated chromium nitride thin films. IntroductionNowadays the interest of researchers in developing new materials and new technologies for obtaining these new materials is growing so that the increasing need of consumers is satisfied. Different types of nitrides such as titanium nitride [1][2][3][4][5], chromium nitride [6-10], and niobium nitride [11][12][13][14][15] and so on are used for applications such as cutting tools, decorative and protective coatings in the automotive industry, microelectronics, biomedical or aeronautical industries, diffusion barrier in microelectronics etc. The use of these kinds of materials is due to their chemical, mechanical, electrical and tribological properties [1, 16]. The characteristics of these ceramics can be obtained by direct current (DC) or radio-frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering [1, 3, 6, 12, 16], laser ablation [4], ion beam assisted deposition [5] and vacuum arc plasma deposition [8] and so on.Chromium nitride awakes researcher interest for MEMS applications due to its good chemical, wear and corrosion resistance, its good thermal stability, high hardness and so forth [6, 7]. Chromium nitride thin films can be used in corrosive and high temperature environments where titanium nitride thin films cannot be used because of its smaller temperature resistance [8]. One of the most used technologies to elaborate such films is magnetron sputtering [6, 7, 17, 18, 19] due to its high deposition rate, its possibility to control the deposition process and due to the low temperature of the substrate during the deposition. Controlling the substrate temperature, the argon and nitrogen flows,
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