Effects of Substrate Bias on the Hardness and Resistivity of Reactively Sputtered TaN and TiN Thin Films

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TaN and TiN films are being widely used as conductive layers in electronic devices or protective coatings on metal surfaces. Among various deposition methods, reactive magnetron sputtering is preferred partly due to its ability to control the energy of the depositing ions by applying different substrate bias voltages. In this study, TaN and TiN films were deposited on Si/SiO2 substrates by using direct current magnetron sputtering technique with 370 W target power at 1.9 mTorr and under different substrate biases. The effects of the substrate bias on both the resistivity and the hardness of the deposited TaN and TiN films were investigated. The phase and composition of the deposited films were investigated by x-ray diffraction, the resistivity was measured by a four-point probe, and the hardness was obtained by nano-indentation. For TaN films, the use of substrate bias not only increased the hardness but also increased the resistivity. Moreover, the formation of the Ta3N5 phase at the −300 V substrate bias significantly increased the TaN film resistivity. For TiN films, the optimum resistivity (minimum) of 19.5 µΩ-cm and the hardness (maximum) of 31.5 GPa were achieved at the −100 V substrate bias. Since the phase changes occurred in both the TaN and the TiN films at higher substrate biases and these phase changes negatively affected the resistivity or hardness property of the films, the substrate bias should not significantly exceed −100 V.