| AVS 54th International Symposium | |
| Applied Surface Science | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session AS-TuP |
| Session: | Aspects of Applied Surface Science Poster Session |
| Presenter: | M.H. Engelhard, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory |
| Authors: | M.H. Engelhard, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory T.C. Droubay, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory L.V. Saraf, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory P. Nachimuthu, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory A.S. Lea, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory W. Stickle, Hewlett Packard C. Mathews, University of Texas at Dallas B. Lee, University of Texas at Dallas J. Kim, University of Texas at Dallas R.M. Wallace, University of Texas at Dallas D.R. Baer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Oxide films play increasingly important roles in several modern technologies, including integrated circuits, fuel cells, and sensors. Important to the use of surface analysis techniques to characterize a variety of these materials systems is the knowledge of the sputter rates for different oxides. Since research in our laboratories and for users of the US Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) user facility involves the use of oxide films and particles, we have been building an oxide sputter rate database by examining thin films grown by oxygen plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (OPA-MBE). These studies demonstrate that we can usually obtain sputter rate reproducibility of better than 5% for similar oxide films grown by OPA-MBE. However, it is well known that there are many sputtering artifacts that can occur including those due to crystal orientation, structure, or the presence of impurities. In order to examine the general applicability of the information from the epitaxial film "standards" to other materials, we are measuring the sputter rates for oxide films for a different crystal structures and/or deposition techniques. Here, we report measurements of sputter rates for ZnO, TiO2 , and Al2O3 films prepared by pulsed laser deposition, chemical vapor deposition, or atomic layer deposition. We are currently examining the dependency of density as well as crystal structure on sputter rates. X-ray reflectivity (XRR) has been used to measure the thickness and density of these films and sputter rates are measured using a PHI Quantum 2000 Scanning ESCA Microprobe. The measured sputter rates are compared to rates for known thicknesses of SiO2/Si. Work at PNNL is supported by the Department of Energy and work at UT-Dallas is supported in part by the Semiconductor Research Corporation.