An off-normal fibre-like texture in thin films on single-crystal substrates

Band engineering in silicide alloys

“…Typically, monosilicides are preferred over higher order silicides, such as disilicides, due to a lower Si consumption. Nickel and platinum monosilicides have recently attracted significant interest [2,3]. Metal silicides are formed by a heat treatment of a metal-semiconductor contact.…”

The Texture of Thin NiSi Films and Its Effect on Agglomeration

“…Mechanism for agglomeration Since epitaxial grains have an excellent interface match with the substrate, and axiotaxial grains, while slightly worse than epitaxy, still have a decent interface match due to the 1-dimensional periodicity, there is a driving force for axiotaxial and epitaxial grains to consume randomly oriented neighbor grains, due to the lowering of the interface energy which can be accomplished in that way. As noted in [1], the axiotaxial orientation relation has the property of being largely independent of the shape of the interface. Going from a flat interface to a spherical one results in the lowest amount of interface energy per unit of volume of the grain.…”

“…For CoSi 2 , this was done by Bulle-Lieuwma et al [8], resulting in a variety of epitaxial orientations in which CoSi 2 can grow on Si 100. For NiSi, this resulted in the discovery of a new type of texture in thin films, which was given the name "axiotaxy" [1].…”

“…It was recently [1] discovered that these films exhibit a peculiar type of texture, which was called "axiotaxy", whereby certain lattice planes in the NiSi grains are preferentially aligned to (110)-type lattice planes in the single crystal Si substrate. In this contribution, we present a quantitative study of this phenomenon, using both XRD pole figure measurements and EBSD.…”

Texture in thin film silicides and germanides: A review

“…4(b)). Further improvements to the technique eventually led to the discovery of axiotaxy in NiSi films 31 (see Fig. 4(c)), which will be discussed in Section III C. Over the past decade, the texture of several thin film silicides and germanides has been investigated using these high-resolution synchrotron based pole figure measurements (see Section III B).…”