Preparation and Characterization of Nanostructured Silicon Nitride Thin Films by Reactive Sputtering

Abstract

In this work, silicon nitride nanostructures were synthesized by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique. The effect of deposition time on the structural characteristics, especially structural purity and nanoparticle size, was determined. Long deposition time allows more silicon atoms sputtered from the target to bond to nitrogen atoms and form silicon nitride molecules. Therefore, the structure of the final product is highly dominated by silicon nitride as confirmed by the x-ray diffraction pattern. On the other hand, nanoparticles with larger size were grown at long deposition time. As the deposition time was increased from 3 to 4 hours, the nanoparticle size was increased from 26.10 to 101.20 nm. The structural characteristics of silicon nitride nanoparticles can be sufficiently controlled by the preparation conditions to serve certain applications based on nanoparticle size.