Low Temperature Physical-Chemical Vapor Deposition of Ti-Si-N-O Barrier Films

Ti-Si-N-O films were grown by radio frequency reactive magnetron sputtering of a titanium target with nitrogen and silane gases introduced at a temperature of . X-ray diffraction and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results show that Ti-N, Si-N, Ti-Si, Ti-O, Si-O, and Si-N-O compounds are formed. High-resolution-transmission-electron-microscopy reveals that the film consists of Ti-N, Si-N, Ti-Si nanocrystals embedded in an amorphous Ti-O, Si-O, and Si-N-O matrix. This type of microstructure gives rise to very high stability against copper diffusion under bias temperature stressing (BTS) compared to binary barrier materials. The BTS result shows that film can effectively block copper ion diffusion for up to at .