The effects of plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition process variables on the properties of amorphous silicon carbide films

Amorphous hydrogenated carbon films containing silicon are of considerable interest for a variety of applications including window layers for solar cells, anti-abrasion coatings, masks for x-ray photolithography and biomedical applications. Plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition (PACVD) is one of the preferred techniques for depositing these films.; a-Si:C:H films were deposited by PACVD using a plasma reactor with capacitively coupled parallel plate configuration operating at 13.56 MHz. The following film properties were studied: intrinsic stress (from the curvature of the substrates), micro-hardness (obtained from nanoindentation), surface roughness and morphology (studied using atomic force microscopy), surface energy (obtained from wetting angle measurements) and the optical constants of the films (as obtained from computer modeling of ellipsometric data). The composition of the films was established from Rutherford backscattering experiments and the hydrogen content was measured using nuclear reaction analysis.; By investigating the process variables of the PACVD system using a 2-level factorial experimental design, a better understanding of this complex deposition process has been gained. From this study some of the relationships between the process variables of the PACVD system and physical characteristics of the deposited films such as surface roughness, film stress and optical properties have been established. For example, increasing the energy of bombarding ions produced an increase in the surface roughness under certain conditions, but produced a decrease in roughness under other conditions. In another case, changing the composition of the source gas produced a significant change in the refractive index of the films when the ion energy was high, but had little effect when the ion energy was low.; Values obtained for the surface roughness of the films and the dispersion functions of n and k obtained from the ellipsometric modeling were in general agreement with others reported in the literature [73–75 and 84–86].; The factorial analysis shows that the process variables tend to interact in their effects on film characteristics and cannot therefore be studied separately. This investigation has provided some important insights into the dynamics of a-Si:C:H film growth by the PACVD process.