AVS 50th International Symposium
    Thin Films Wednesday Sessions
       Session TF-WeP

Paper TF-WeP26
Structure and Properties of Nanolaminate Chromium/ Titanium Oxide Films by Pulsed-DC Reactive Sputtering

Wednesday, November 5, 2003, 11:00 am, Room Hall A-C

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: M.S. Wong, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, ROC
Authors: M.S. Wong, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, ROC
M.C. Yang, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, ROC
H.B. Chou, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, ROC
M.E. Graham, Northwestern University
Correspondent: Click to Email
The outstanding optical, semiconducting and mechanical properties of titanium and chromium oxides have made them useful for many applications. Ion-assisted, high-rate, reactive, pulsed-dc magnetron sputtering is used to deposit the nanometer-scale multilayered oxide films. RF substrate bias was applied to induce ion bombardment to modify the structure of the growing films. Various characterization methods such as ellipsometry, Raman spectroscopy, UV-Visible spectroscopy, XRD, SEM, TEM, hardness and stress measurement techniques were used to measure the crystallinity, morphology, optical and mechanical properties of the films. Under suitable conditions, the sputtered metal atoms will react with the partial pressure of supplied oxygen to form stoichiometric and transparent oxide films. Crystalline Cr2O3 and anatase TiO2 were deposited as single-layer films, and as Cr/Ti-oxide multilayers. When the period of the multilayer was below ~7 nm, the multilayer structure was not observed, and Cr-Ti-O alloy films appeared to be formed instead. The energy gaps for Cr2O3, Cr-Ti-O and TiO2 films are ~2.1, ~2.5 and ~3.2 eV, respectively. The Cr2O3 and Cr-Ti-O films possess high hardness, over 20 GPa. The effects of substrate bias and multilayer period on the structure and properties of the oxides will be discussed.