Effect of substrate bias on microstructure of epitaxial film grown by HiPIMS: An atomistic simulation

TL;DR

This study uses atomistic simulations to analyze how substrate bias energy influences the microstructure of epitaxial Cu films grown by HiPIMS, revealing optimal conditions for smooth, defect-free films.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed atomistic simulation approach to compare substrate bias effects in HiPIMS versus thermal evaporation for epitaxial film growth.

Findings

Low energy HiPIMS yields smoother surfaces and more interface mixing.

Moderate energy HiPIMS produces smoother surfaces with fewer defects.

High energy HiPIMS causes severe interface mixing and limited growth due to resputtering.

Abstract

We explore combination of high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) and substrate bias for the epitaxial growth of Cu film on Cu (111) substrate by molecular dynamics simulation. A fully ionized deposition flux was used to represent the high ionization fraction in the HiPIMS process. To mimic different substrate bias, we assumed the deposition flux with a flat energy distribution in the low, moderate and high energy ranges. We also compared the results of fully ionized flux with results assuming a completely neutral flux, in analogy with thermal evaporation. It is confirmed that in the low energy regime, HiPIMS presents a slightly smoother surface and more interface mixing compared to that of thermal evaporation. In the moderate energy HiPIMS, however, an atomically smooth surface was obtained with a slight increase in the interface mixing compared to low energy HiPIMS. In the high energy regime, HiPIMS presents severe interface mixing with a smooth surface but limited growth due to resputtering from the surface. The results also indicate that fewer crystal defects appear in the film for moderate energy HiPIMS. We attribute this behavior to the repetition frequency of collision events. In particular high energy HiPIMS suffers from high repetition of collision events which does not allow reconstruction of the film. While in the low energy HiPIMS there are not enough events to overcome island growth. At moderate energy, collision events repeat in a manner that provides enough time for reconstruction which results in a smooth surface, fewer defects and limited intermixing.