Low-voltage triode sputtering with a confined plasma: Part I—geometric aspects of deposition

Abstract

Low-voltage triode sputtering is a film deposition process capable of high deposition rates (100–600 Å/min) using voltages less than 500 V and Ar pressures of about 1 μ. This paper considers the geometric aspects of low-voltage triode deposition which include: (1) the thickness uniformity over the substrate table; (2) step coverage; and (3) the geometric conditions that give the best thickness uniformity, step coverage, and maximum utilization of target area.

Surface roughness and in-plane texturing in sputtered thin films

“…This sort of ''mound competition'' has been predicted for amorphous films deposited onto roughened surfaces. [13][14][15][16] The modeling work done by Bales and Zangwill 13 is relevant to the films grown in this experiment because we observe shadowing effects which take place as a result of rough surface features which are much larger than the nucleating and developing grains. Two levels of shadowing occur: macroscopic effects due to the rough substrate features and microscopic effects due to the roughness created by individual grain formation.…”

Mechanisms of layer growth in microwave-PECVD silan plasmas – Experiment and simulation

“…Thus, the layer growth of these coatings can be simulated with the already existing Monte-Carlo codes, which can be found in literature [10][11][12][13][14]. In such a deposition process, the chemical reaction of the layer-forming radicals with the target or the already grown coating is more or less insignificant, because of the (low) thermal energy of the film-forming radicals.…”

“…An extension to this approach is the distinction of the various film-forming particles. By an inclusion of their sticking probability, this problem necessitates a numerical solution, which was treated in several works in the 1970's and 1980's [10][11][12][13][14]. The used simulation algorithm is the Monte-Carlo method in all cases.…”