carbide|boride|nitride
Our group developed a dedicated sputter tool including HIPIMS, RF, and DC sputtering to prepare binary, ternary, quaternary, and quinary refractory metal carbides, borides, nitrides, and mixtures in between. The instrument uses elemental and alloy targets as the metal source, and graphite targets, boron targets, methane or nitrogen gas as the “anion” source. The instrument includes isotopically pure C12 and C13 based methane for diffusion studies. The substrate manipulator features a BN-coated graphite heating element that can access 900 °C wafer temperatures. HiPIMS plasma drive is of particular interest for carbide deposition. HIPIMS stands for High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering. It enables one to achieve plasma power densities greater than 1 kW/cm2 under pulsed conditions with a duty cycle (or percent on time) of about 10%. With such high powers one achieves ionization fractions greater than 50% of both gas-phase and metallic species. The resulting plasmas are highly reactive, contain substantial kinetic energy, and feature less re-sputtering effects.
