Low-Temperature Thin-Film Deposition and Crystallization

Crystalline oxide films are important compo-nents in a wide array of electronic and optical devices, and their study and manufacture in-volve major aspects of current science and technology. A plethora of methods, such as sputtering, chemical vapor deposition, pulsed laser deposition, and sol-gel, are commonly used to deposit these films, and many new techniques are being developed (1). In each of these methods, however, the deposited film is amorphous. For those applications requiring a crystalline film, an additional high-temperature processing step is required. This high-temperature step can lead to con-siderable constraints in combining the desir-