Growth of aligned CN_x nanocolumns on silicon by RF-magnetron sputtering

摘要

Over the past few years, the interest for the nano-sized C-based materials has received a growing interest, due to peculiar properties that may lead to several applications in electronic devices and sensors. Furthermore, recently, it was shown that carbon-based hard materials, such as diamond-like carbon and carbon nitride thin films, can be used as protective coatings, due to high wear resistance, low friction and high elasticity combined with high hardness 1,2, as dielectrics, due to high resistivity and breakdown fields in metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) devices 3 and for display applications, since the incorporation of nitrogen was shown to improve the field emission from amorphous carbon (a-C) 4, The C-N thin film system, obtained by magnetron sputtering, has been observed mainly in the amorphous phase or in a fullerene-like structure, depending on the growth parameters (i.e. temperature and deposition rate).