Investigation of titanium nitride films deposited at room temperature by energetic cluster impact

Energetic cluster impact (ECT) deposition was applied to grow titanium nitr ide films on silicon (100) substrate at room temperature. Proton elastic sc attering (PES), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) w ere employed to characterize the composition. structure and morphology of T iNx films, respectively. The PES results reveal that the films are N-defici ent and there exists a certain amount of oxygen impurity in the films. It i s found from the XRD results that the structure of TiNx films is sensitive to experimental conditions such as nitrogen gas partial pressure, sputterin g current and substrate bias voltage and that TiNx films are (220) preferre d orientation within some range of experimental conditions. The AFM observa tion indicates that the films become more uniform and compact with increasi ng substrate bias voltage. The root mean square roughness also decreases wi th increasing bias voltage. Some interpretation for the above results are a lso given in this paper. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved .