Controlled Reactive Sputter Synthesis of Refractory Oxides: , The Silicon‐Oxygen System

Abstract

Reactive sputter deposition of refractory oxides, under conditions in which the reaction between the sputtered species and the oxygen is isolated to the deposition surface, has been experimentally investigated, and results have been obtained for the formation of . It is shown that the dependence of the deposited film stoichiometry on oxygen pressure and the incidence rate of silicon can be correlated with reported results of oxygen adsorption onto single‐crystal silicon surfaces and amorphous silicon surfaces. This correlation is made in terms of oxygen exposure and, in our work, a dynamic exposure is defined for steady‐state synthesis conditions by placing the origin of a moving reference frame at the deposition surface. This correlation shows that the sticking coefficient of oxygen onto room temperature substrates is independent of oxygen coverage (i.e., surface stoichiometry) for coverages less than 0.8. This requires that a mobile precursor adsorption process be operative for oxygen in our experiments. The deduced pressure‐independent oxygen sticking coefficient is .