AVS 49th International Symposium
    Thin Films Tuesday Sessions
       Session TF-TuP

Paper TF-TuP6
Preparation of Fe and Fe-N Thin Films using RF Magnetron Sputtering with Multipolar Magnetic Plasma Confinement

Tuesday, November 5, 2002, 5:30 pm, Room Exhibit Hall B2

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: K. Kawai, Hiroshima Institute of Technology, Japan
Authors: K. Kawai, Hiroshima Institute of Technology, Japan
H. Harada, Hiroshima Institute of Technology, Japan
K. Kawabata, Hiroshima Institute of Technology, Japan
Correspondent: Click to Email
Thin films of @alpha@Fe or alloys are suitable and widely used as media materials. Among them, Fe and Fe-N thin films are promising candidates as materials for thin film heads used in magnetic recording devices because of their saturation magnetization characteristics. However, the efficient preparation of ferromagnetic thin films at a low gas pressure for a conventional planar magnetron sputtering with a thick target of magnetic materials is difficult because of the lower magnetic field above the target. We previously developed an unbalanced magnetron sputtering with a multipolar magnetic plasma confinement(MMPC) to prepare ferromagnetic thin films. The thin films of Fe and Fe-N were prepared on 7059glass substrates by the RF (13.56MHz) magnetron sputtering technique with MMPC, employing an Fe target(100mm@phi@,5mm thick). Fe films were prepared at the RF powers of 100-200W and argon pressure down to 6.7x10@super -1@Pa. It is shown that the deposition rate of Fe films linearly increases from about 4 to 12 nm/min, whose values are three times that of a conventional magnetron sputtering system. Fe-N films were also deposited by the same sputtering system in an Ar-N@sub 2@ gas mixture at different total gas pressures of 6.7x10@super -1@-8.0x10@super -2@Pa and the gas flow ratio(N@sub 2@/Ar+N@sub 2@) of 0.1-0.6,where an RF power was kept at 150W. The electrical resistivity for reactively sputtered Fe-N films was significantly decreased from 300 to 90µm@ohm@cm by lowering the total gas pressure to 8.0x10@super -2@Pa. Compositional ratios were obtained in the range of 0-0.3 with increasing gas flow ratio of N@sub 2@ by XPS. The intensity of the Fe@sub 3@N line is observed by an XRD pattern of the Fe-N films deposited at 8x10@super -2@Pa. These results demonstrated that this method is useful for fabricating high quality Fe-N thin films. Thus, this sputtering system is expected to greatly improve the efficient fabrication of high quality Fe and Fe-N thin films.