Long-term environmental stability of residual stress of SiNx, SiOx, and Ge thin films prepared at low temperatures

Optical Microelectromechanical Systems Technologies for Spectrally Adaptive Sensing and Imaging

“…With the inherent necessity to use different materials for devices being developed to operate in different SWIR, MWIR, LWIR, and THz wavelength bands come additional restrictions on device fabrication process flow in terms of thin film deposition and etching, post fabrication annealing, bonding, packaging and system integration. Issues relating for example to thin film stress, [ 22,27 ] device thermal fabrication [ 21 ] and operation [ 25 ] budgets, as well as long‐term environmental stability [ 24 ] need to be carefully considered. Consequently, the design concept shown in Figure 3a is discussed in this review as more suitable for SWIR, MWIR, and THz devices; whereas the structure shown in Figure 3b as being more suitable to span applications in MWIR and LWIR.…”

SiOx by magnetron sputtered revisited: Tailoring the photonic properties of multilayers

“…Recently, SiO x nanowires have been proposed as refractive index sensing devices, [10] while in the form of stacked layers and porous films this material is utilized for the fabrication of Li battery electrodes. [11,12] Compact SiO x thin films have been fabricated by various methods, including evaporation [13][14][15] thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD), [16,17] or magnetron sputtering (MS). [18-20] Radio frequency reactive MS was profusely utilized by Habraken et al for the deposition of SiOx thin films.…”

“…In general, most fabrication methodologies including MS and electrochemical etching of silicon provide a good control over the stoichiometry of compact films, but are not well-suited for simultaneously tailoring film porosity, nanostructure and stoichiometry. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] These limitations have been overcome in the present work thanks to a new thin film synthesis procedure consisting of the room temperature reactive magnetron sputtering deposition (r-MS) at oblique angles (r-MS-OAD) that permits simultaneously tuning both film porosity and O/Si ratio. For electron beam evaporated OAD films, the dependence between nanocolumnar structure and deposition conditions has been amply discussed in literature [29,30] and used for the fabrication of Si or SiO x thin films with controlled nanocolumnar microstructure.…”

Simple realization of efficient barrier performance of a single layer silicon nitride film via plasma chemistry

“…[35][36][37] Specifically, low temperature deposition by PECVD is the most promising method, considering its scale-up capability for larger areas, relatively low processing time and high growth rate. 38,39 Also, there are numerous studies on the effects of the SiH 4 /NH 3 gas mixing ratio and plasma excitation frequency on the WVTR, 37,40 the effects of deposition temperature and applied power on the mechanical and chemical properties, 41 and the correlation between process temperature and film stress 42 and film defects 22,43 present in the literature. Notably, most of these studies report a WVTR of Z0.1 g m À2 per day, which is several orders of magnitude larger than the requirements.…”

“…Additionally, both types of studies have a common goal that is mostly concentrated on the barrier properties as well as the reduction of the WVTR of the as-deposited films. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][40][41][42][43] Further, it is worth mentioning that studying and understanding plasma behavior along with the associated plasma chemistry is a crucial factor in recognizing and improving plasma processes for barrier thin film deposition. For the mass scale fabrication of these materials, we require examination of the operation/parameter space, determination of favorable processing conditions and a good understanding of the plasma process.…”