Studies on Reactive Sputtering Processes of Oxide Thin Films

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In the fiscal year 2001, we have succeeded in producing the high density ICP, and investigated the fundamental discharge properties under several operation conditions such as the sole PM operation, the sole ICP operation, and the simultaneous operation of PM and ICP.The use of functional oxide thin films such as MgO, TiO_2, ZnO, and A1_2O_3 has been rapidly increasing in industry because of superior electrical, optical, mechanical, and biological nature of these materials. Thus, the high-rate deposition of high-quality oxide thin films has been more demanded than ever. In the past, various techniques such as sputtering, electron-beam evaporation, ion plating, and sol-gel methods, have been used for the fabrication of oxide thin films. In general, the sputtering method has the distinct advantages of low temperature processing for polycrystalline materials, film uniformity over large areas, and scalabiliry; however, its industrial application has been limited due to its low deposition ra … More te. For example, the deposition rate for MgO in the sputter based method is at the most 0.5 nm/s. For the purpose of high-rate deposition of high-quality magnesium oxide thin films that have been used as the protection-layers of discharge electrodes in plasma display panels, we have proposed a new reactive sputtering process in which conventional planar magnetron (PM) is assisted -by the inductively coupled plasma (ICP).Obtained results in the fiscal year 2001 are summarized as follows :1) By-using an internal single-turn coil antenna, we have succeeded in producing high-density ICP.2) Application of 13.56MHz RF power of several hundreds ofW generated an ideal ICP with a density of more than 10^<17>m^<-3>.3) As a result of the optical emission measurements of the axial and radial spatial profiles with an image-intensified CCD camera and spectrometers, we have confirmed that an ideal ICP was produced between the target and substrate electrodes.4) As a result of the comparison between the above-mentioned operation conditions, we have confirmed that the simultaneous operation of ICP and PM is effective for reionizing the sputtered metallic atoms. Less