16 - Chemical vapor deposition of ferrite thin films

Abstract

With the development of smart devices, ferrite thin films demonstrate high permeabilities and resistivities that make them interesting materials for high-frequency microwave devices. These ferrite thin films can minimize the volume of devices and improve some desirable properties, which are not possible to achieve using bulk materials. Ferrite thin films can be synthesized by several deposition techniques like chemical vapor deposition (CVD), sputtering, and laser ablation. This chapter covers the up-to-date research activities on the synthesis of ferrite thin films by CVD process because of large area growth and good coverage on complex structures and can deposit metals, oxides, and semiconductors films. The CVD process facilitates a chemical reaction of a volatile compound material that produces a nonvolatile solid material by reacting with other gases that deposit layer-by-layer at an atomic scale on an appropriate substrate. It has become one of the most powerful techniques of thin film growth. The first section of this chapter offers a summary of the fundamentals of ferrite thin films, the definition and history of the CVD technique, and its variant. In the next section, growth mechanism, growth parameters, gas kinetics, precursor requirements, and CVD reactors are described. Finally, the conclusion along with applications and future perspectives are also highlighted.