THIN FILM DEPOSITTION BY PHYSICAL VAPOR DEPOSITION (PVD) )

EVAPORATION DEPOSITION

SPUTTER DEPOSITION

PULSED LASER DEPOSITION

PHYSICAL VAPOR DEPOSITION (PVD): Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) is a vacuum deposition process which is widely used in technology and material science. PVD is a general term used to describe different methods to deposit thin films by the condensation of a vaporized form of the material onto various surfaces. This process involves purely physical processes such as high temperature vacuum evaporation by heating of materials or plasma sputter bombardment rather than involving a chemical reaction at the surface so called chemical vapor deposition. There are different PVD techniques nowadays: Evaporation deposition - In which the material to be deposited is heated to a high vapor pressure by electrically resistive heating or by electron beam bombardment (EBVPD) in vacuum. Sputter deposition - In which ions (from ion source or a plasma discharge) bombard the material sputtering some away as a vapor. Cathodic Arc Deposition - In which a high power arc directed at the target material blasts away some material into vapor. Pulsed laser deposition - In which a high power laser ablates material from the target into vapor. Electron Beam,

Ion Beam Evaporation or IBAD (Ion Beam Assisted Deposition)

There are many uses for ions in connection with the production of thin lms. High energy (5200 keV) ions can be used for doping layers with electrically active impurities. Ions can also be used for deposition, where individual ions, or charged clusters can be deposited at a range of energies. Clearly, the fact that the ions are charged allows extra control, and there are various methods by which this can be done. Directed ion beams from an accelerator form the most obvious possibility, but plasma and magnetron sources are also widely used.

Advantages: Better quality deposits can be obtained at lower substrate temperatures, thus avoiding large scale inter-diffusion which results from high temperature processing. However, the deposited lms adhere well to the substrate because of the localized limited mixing caused by the ion impacts.

Pulsed Laser Deposition: Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) of thin lms is now used in materials research laboratories round the world for prototyping thin lms of many inorganic materials and even in some device fabrication protocols. This development has been made possible by the increasing versatility and reliability of the ultraviolet (UV) excimer laser as it evolved particularly after the 1980s. Principle: In PLD, a pulsed laser is focused onto a target of the material to be deposited. For sufciently high laser energy density, each laser pulse vaporizes or ablates a small amount of the material creating a plasma plume. The ablated material is ejected from the target in a highly forward-directed plume. The ablation plume provides the material ux for lm growth. The laser, in the PLD, can be viewed as the agent that opens a route to nonequilibrium reaction pathways, which can in turn be exploited to deposit thin lms or investigate novel reactions. Laser ablation of materials from bulk targets is a highly nonequilibrium process that allows stoichiometric transfer and delivery of controlled target composition to the substrate. This aspect is particularly crucial for metal oxides where materials systems of interest often consist of multiple components with different vapor pressures. Features: capable of synthesizing thin lms of multicomponent materials able to realize stoichiometric transfer of ablated material from multication targets for many materials.

Variants of PLD techniques: 1. Pulsed Laser Deposition with UV Lasers:

When a substrate is placed in the path of the ablation plume, the monomeroligomeric fragments recombine and are deposited as a polymeric thin lm, with the repolymerization reaction possibly catalyzed by the presence of radicals. 2. Matrix-Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation: In this approach, a polymer or other organic to be deposited is dissolved in an appropriate solvent, and the solution is decanted into a metal target die where it is frozen. The frozen target is then placed into a vacuum chamber and the experiment proceeds as with PLD. MAPLE has been used to deposit a variety of materials such as chemoselective polymers Applications of PLD technique : 1. Complex Oxide Film Growth In the growth of crystalline oxides, PLD has proven to be most effective. The growth of complex oxides requires the delivery of a growth ux with the correct stoichiometry in an oxidizing ambient that is favorable for the desired phase formation. The utility of pulsed laser deposition in reproducing target stoichiometry has been demonstrated for a number of multication oxides. 2. Epitaxial Interface and Superlattice Formation Developments in oxide PLD lm growth have provided remarkable opportunities in the synthesis of epitaxial heterostructures and superlattices. Pulsed laser deposition also yields the opportunity to create atomically abrupt interfaces between materials that are chemically dissimilar, including epitaxial metaloxide and semiconductoroxide structures. 3. Superconducting Electronic Devices: PLD has been used in the epitaxial growth of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) thin lms, thus potential electronics applications involving PLD-grown HTS lms include high-frequency electronics for radio frequency (RF)/microwave communications and superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) for the detection of minute magnetic elds, have been explored.