Sputter Deposition Processes

Sputter deposition is a widely used technique to deposit thin films on substrates. The technique is based on ion bombardment of a source material, the target. Ion bombardment results in a vapor due to a purely physical process, i.e., the sputtering of the target material. This technique is part of the class of physical vapor deposition techniques, which includes thermal evaporation and pulsed laser deposition. The most common approach for growing thin films by sputter deposition is the use of a magnetron source in which positive ions present in the plasma of a magnetically enhanced glow discharge bombard the target. This technique forms the focus of this chapter. The target can be powered in different ways, ranging from direct current (DC) for conductive targets to radio frequency (RF) for nonconductive targets, to a variety of different ways of applying current and/or voltage pulses to the target. Since sputtering is a purely physical process, adding chemistry to, for example, deposit a compound layer must be done ad hoc through the addition of a reactive gas to the plasma, i.e. reactive sputtering. The undesirable reaction of the reactive gas with the target material results in a nonlinear behavior of the deposition parameters as a function of the reactive gas flow. To model this behavior, the fluxes of the various species toward the target must be determined. Equally important are the fluxes of species incident at the substrate because they not only influence the reactive sputter deposition process, but also control the growth of the desired film.