Investigation of the impact of various parameters on the morphology of thin films produced by the sputtering process

Abstract

the magnetron sputtering method is a physical vapor deposition (PVD) method that uses low pressure plasmas and is currently widely employed in industry for the synthesis of thin films in fields of application like mechanics, optics, electronics, data storage, or even decorating. This technique involves creating a thin layer or film on the material surface, known as the "substrate," in order to give it the properties of the sputtered material. In this thesis our work will focus on studying the factors that can impact the deposition process, based on the Monte Carlo simulation, we will use the SRIM model to calculate the sputtering yield of the metals and semiconductors used as the target material, considering the Argon as bombardment gas, we deduce firstly the best sputtering yield possible in order to identify the maximum bombardment energy and angle of incident which will help us to obtain the highest number of atoms ejected from each material used, then the sputtered atoms transport into the substrate will be calculated by using the second model SIMTRA, during the transport of these species, a variation in temperature (100, 300 and 600K) and pressure (0.5, 2 and 5Pa) is applied ,finally we will analyze the deposition of the atoms ejected by a target-substrate distance variation, the ultimate goal is to understand the effect of those parameters on the deposition of thin films and to deduce the finest adjustment for the magnetron sputtering that we should apply to acquire a maximum number of atoms arrived on the substrate.