Date of Award

2011-01-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Electrical Engineering

Advisor(s)

Chintalapalle Ramana

Abstract

This thesis presents the optimization of growth conditions for fabricating nanocrystalline Yttrium Oxide (Y2O3) thin films on silicon and optical grade, high quality quartz substrates in order to study its structural, optical and electrical properties for electronic device applications.

Commercially Y2O3 has proven to be difficult to fabricate at high quality due to its high temperature growth requirements and the need to alter established fabrication methods for electronic devices. A high temperature requirement for high quality poses a problem for research and analysis. This calls upon for an optimization of the growth conditions to facilitate fabrication of thin films for study that does not require mass production level efficiency or material growth speed. The work in thesis research started out with basic parameters used in industry for growth conditions despite having varying deposition methods and equipment that were used in the existing literature.

Reducing the chamber pressure while maintaining the argon to oxygen ratio improved the Y-oxide film quality; lower deposition pressures afford higher deposition rates of material onto the substrates. Once promising samples were obtained, the chamber pressures were lowered to the least possible values at which an ignited plasma was sustainable while still maintaining constant argon to oxygen ratio.

The effect of processing conditions on the structure, optical and electrical properties demonstrated that the approach is viable and yielded fairly good quality Y2O3 thin films. The quality of the samples was evident from the observed high refractive index at high temperatures, good electrical properties and excellent stoichiometery. These samples proved that optimizations of growth conditions can be made such that high temperatures were not required to fabricate samples to study the properties of the material. It also showed promise for commercial level optimizations that may lead to lower demands of higher temperatures for mass production.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

56 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Mudavakkat Vikas Haridas

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