Electrical and optical properties of CNx(0⩽x⩽0.25) films deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering

The electrical and optical properties of carbon-nitride CNx films (0⩽x⩽0.25) deposited by unbalanced reactive magnetron sputtering from a graphite target in mixed Ar/N2 discharges at a substrate temperature of 350 °C have been investigated. Pure C films exhibit a dark conductivity at room temperature of 25 Ω−1 cm−1, which grows up to 250 Ω−1 cm−1 for CNx films with N content of 20%. For CNx films, temperature-dependent conductivity measurements suggest that two electron conduction processes exist in the investigated temperature range 130