Thin Solid Films 420 – 421 (2002) 429–432 0040-6090/02/$ - see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0040-6090 Ž 02 . 00807-6 Polycrystalline Si thin film growth on glass using pulsed d.c. magnetron sputtering Min J. Jung *, Yun M. Jung , Leonid R. Shaginyan , Jeon G. Han a, a b a Center for Advanced Plasma Surface Technology, Sungkyunkwan University, 300 Chunchun-dong, Jangan-gu, Suwon 440-746, South Korea a Institute for Problems of Materials Science of Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev, Ukraine b Abstract Crystalline poly-Si thin films were deposited on Corning glass substrates at a temperature of 500 8C using a pulsed d.c. magnetron sputtering source. The increased bias voltage causes an enhancement of the potential difference between the plasma and substrate. In case of the bipolar pulsed d.c. magnetron sputtering, V shows higher value than that in the unipolar pulsed d.c. p as the bias voltage increases. Therefore, the mobility of the sputtered adatoms increases by the surface heat accumulation of energetic sputtered particles with the increased bias voltage. Consequently, more higher mobility (41 cm Vs ) and crystallinity 2 y1 were obtained for the Si film grown with the bipolar-pulsed d.c. magnetron sputtering due to the energy incorporation by enhanced bombardment of Ar ions.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Magnetron sputtering; Polysilicon; Substrate bias; Hall mobility; Raman spectra 1. Introduction Polycrystalline Si thin film is widely used as an industrial material for thin film transistors for flat panel display (FPD) and photovoltaic applications because it shows high mobility, electrical conductivity and high- energy conversion efficiency compared with a-Si w1,2x. Over the past few years, there have been a variety of techniques on the thin film growth of poly-Si. Among them, solid phase crystallization (SPC) and excimer laser annealing (ELA) have been considered as the most frequently used methods. However, the SPC method has a too high crystallization temperature (f650 8C) for the glass substrate. Although the ELA method is suitable at low temperature for glass substrates, there are some problems such as non-uniformity of grain growth on large area glass substrates and expensive processing costs w3x. Recently, a metal-induced crystallization (MIC) method of amorphous silicon has been studied to prepare poly-Si thin films on glass at low temperature w4x. A magnetron sputtering method by a pulsed d.c. source was focused to improve the crystallinity and *Corresponding author. Tel.: q82-31-299-6646; fax: q82-31-290- 5669. E-mail address: minjae21c@hanmail.net (M.J. Jung). grain growth of poly-Si thin film at low temperature w5x. It is also well known that thin film growth can be substantially modified by ion-bombardment during sput- tering w6x. This is particularly important in the case of thin-film deposition at low temperatures where the film growth occurs under highly non-equilibrium conditions. An attractive way to promote the crystalline growth at low temperature is the creation of additional energy in to the surface of the growing film by the bombardment of hyperthermal particles during sputtering processing. Therefore, to investigate the relationships between the film microstructure and growth mechanism of poly-Si thin film, poly-Si was deposited on the glass substrate with a bias voltage for the bombardment of hyperthermal particles by magnetron sputtering. In addition, the epi- taxial orientation, microstructual characteristics and sur- face properties of the films were analyzed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). For the electrical characteri- zation of these films, their properties were obtained from the Hall effect measurement by the van der Pauw measurement. 2. Experimental procedure Poly-Si films were prepared by a pulsed d.c. unbal- anced magnetron sputtering system from an undoped