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Frontier Studies of Metal Thin Films - Deposition and Characterization

Project type: Ph.D. project
Project responsible: Matteo Todeschini
Supervisors:
Partners involved: DTU Danchip,

Project Description

Metal thin films have reached very high importance in several technology branches, ranging from semiconductor industry to production of substrates for graphene growth, to photonics and photovoltaics applications, to catalysis purposes, to diffusion barrier coatings. Between them an extremely important role is played by adhesion layers, permitting uniform deposition of films over substrates of completely different materials. However, even if the importance of these layers is remarkable and constantly increasing, the adhesion layer materials used in the past were usually found in an empiric way, looking more at their benefits than at their structure, without very much knowledge of their structure-physical properties correlation. Part of this Ph.D. project is dedicated to the systematic deposition of adhesion layers, varying: - deposition conditions; - material type; - deposition techniques for the same material. These studies will be performed in order to achieve a complete understanding of the atomic mechanisms that makes a particular material useful as adhesion layer, and also why these layers work much better with some materials than others.

Atomic Layer Deposition is a thin film technique that has obtained high interest in the last 15 years in different applied fields for its properties of accurate thickness control, self-limiting behavior, high aspect-ratio structures coverage, large area films. Nevertheless any in-situ imaging study has been performed until now for the accurate description and comprehension of all the phenomena and problems that occur during ALD growth. Environmental Transmission Electron Microscopy (E-TEM) is an imaging technique at atomic level, widely used for biological and catalysis studies, that permits the study of reactions occurring at the interface between solid substrates and liquid/gaseous compounds. Part of this Ph.D. project is dedicated to the use of E-TEM for the study of in-situ Platinum thin film ALD deposition, for the complete and accurate comprehension of the deposition mechanisms that underlay this kind of growth, and also to give an explanation of the problems that can affect the production of thin metallic layers with the desired properties.