Fully dense, highly conductive nanocrystalline TiN diffusion barrier on steel via reactive high power impulse magnetron sputtering

Kumar, P and Seema, Seema and Gupta, M and Avasthi, S (2021) Fully dense, highly conductive nanocrystalline TiN diffusion barrier on steel via reactive high power impulse magnetron sputtering. In: Thin Solid Films, 722 .

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Abstract

We report fully dense and nanocrystalline TiN that is also highly conductive, using reactive HiPIMS (High power impulse magnetron sputtering) at room temperature. These films are useful as a diffusion barrier for metal interconnects and thin-film solar cells on steel. HiPIMS is known to generate a very dense plasma, which improves the physical properties of TiN even for room-temperature deposition. As the peak power increased from 2.6 kW to 16.6 kW, the films became more nanocrystalline and denser, with the best value of 5.47 g/cm3. Despite the loss in structural order, increasing peak power decreased the film resistivity, from 240 µΩcm to 56 µΩcm; and reduced the roughness from 3.8 nm to 1.2 nm. Compared to TiN from DC sputtering, the electrical resistivity of 16.6 kW HiPIMS TiN is 23-times lower. HiPIMS TiN deposited films are thermally stable up to 900°C. The diffusivity of Fe in HiPIMS TiN films at 700 to 900°C was quantified using secondary ion mass spectrometry. Fe diffuses by bulk and grain-boundary diffusion, with the latter dominating for these polycrystalline films. As expected, the denser HiPIMS TiN also has lower bulk diffusivity of 2.6�10�16cm2s�1, comparable to the state-of-art. HIPIMS may be one of the best techniques to deposit TiN barrier films for solar cells on steel. © 2021

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Thin Solid Films
Publisher:	Elsevier B.V.
Additional Information:	The copyright of this article belongs to Elsevier B.V.
Department/Centre:	Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences > Centre for Nano Science and Engineering
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2021 16:07
Last Modified:	12 Mar 2021 16:07
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68179

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