PECVD-SiOxNy films for large area self-sustained grids applications

Self-sustained bridges of a-SiC:H films obtained by PECVD at low temperatures for MEMS applications

“…For the a-SiC:H films the deposition conditions are shown in Table 1. For the SiO x N y the specific growth conditions were extracted from previous works to obtain 4 lm thick low stress material [3]. The SiH 4 and N 2 O flows were 15 and 37.5 sccm, respectively (giving an N 2 O/SiH 4 flow ratio equal to 2.5).…”

“…With this goal in the last years we have worked in the utilization of PECVD obtained materials to fabricate basic and generic microstructures with the aim of future development of micro-electro-mechanical devices all based on PECVD materials. So, in recent works [3] we have reported the fabrication of self-sustained grids and membranes (flat and corrugated) of silicon oxinitride films (SiO x N y ) obtained by PECVD with areas as large as $1 cm 2 . These microstructures can be applied in silicon based microphones, microrecipients and microflow channels for chemical and biochemical systems and were fabricated by bulk micromachining [4] of silicon substrates and utilize just one PECVD material and deposition step.…”

Thermally actuated a-SiC:H MEMS fabricated by a PECVD process

“…In recent years, we have studied the deposition parameters of these materials to optimize their properties, which are especially suitable for MEMS development. In fact, both materials exhibit low residual stress, especially the SiO x N y films that was tuned to have a low residual stress [6]. Further, these materials have shown high mechanical and structural stability and are almost insensitive the KOH solution that are normally used in bulk micromachining of silicon.…”

“…With this goal, in recent years, we have utilized previous optimized PECVD materials [5][6][7][8] to fabricate self-sustained grids and membranes (flat and corrugated) of low stress silicon oxynitride (SiO x N y ) films [6,9], and microbridges and microtunnels of hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC:H) films [10]. These works demonstrated the compatibility of these PECVD materials with standard microfabrication processes (bulk and surface micromachining) and the mechanical robustness of both materials leading, in a subsequent work, to the fabrication of simple mobile microbridges of a-SiC:H, actuated by thermal expansion induced by Joule effect [11].…”

Deposition and characterization of silicon oxynitride for integrated optical applications

“…However, the literature reports that SiO x N y films deposited by PECVD tend to scratch for thickness higher than 5 lm [16,17] due to the high residual stress that these materials present.…”