Deposition of Titanium Nitride Thin Films onto Silicon by RF Reactive Magnetron Sputtering

Abstract

The properties of TiN films deposited by magnetron sputtering are related to their deposition conditions. The elaboration of our films has been carried out by RF-Magnetron Sputtering (13.56 MHz) from a titanium metallic target in reactive N2/Ar gas mixture. The main variables investigated are the composition of the Ar/N2 gas mixture, the total pressure, the deposition time, the discharge power but in this work the attention is given to the effect of the substrate bias voltage. A study is carried out the effects of these variations on the film growth rates, the film thickness and the properties of TiN films. The deposited films were characterized by energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), and observed by means of atomic force microscopy (AFM).