Deposition, characterization, and device application of amorphous carbon and amorphous silicon films

Date

1997-05

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop an expertise of deposition of amorphous carbon (a-C) films, especially diamond-like carbon (DLC) films using various deposition systems, to acquire better understandings of this material by various characterization techniques, and finally to study the feasibility of using this material as a new dielectric for Metal-to-Metal antifiise devices to solve the switching problem of the amorphous silicon (a-Si) antifuses.

In this work, we report successful deposition of DLC films using a microwave electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma system. We found that a-C:H films deposited without rf biasing are soft and polymer-like and have higher band gaps. DLC films can only be produced under a negative self-bias induced by the rf biasing. The band gap of the film decreases with the increase in rf power, and with the decrease in deposition pressure. This shows that the properties of the films depend mainly on the ion bombardment energy.

Description

Keywords

Semiconductor industry, Semiconductor films, Amorphous semiconductors, Carbon, Silicon

Citation