Microelectronic Engineering 60 (2002) 247–254 www.elsevier.com / locate / mee Electron microscopic investigation of MnSi layers on Si(001) 1.7 * A. Mogilatenko , M. Falke, S. Teichert, S. Schwendler, D.K. Sarkar, H.-J. Hinneberg Institute of Physics, University of Technology Chemnitz, D-09107 Chemnitz, Germany Abstract Semiconducting higher manganese silicides (HMS) with a composition near that of MnSi are of special 1.7 interest due to their thermoelectric properties. We report on the growth of HMS layers deposited by MBE using the template technique. In particular the influence of the template thickness on the structure and morphology of MnSi films on (001)Si substrates was investigated. It was found that there is an optimal template thickness 1.7 that causes preferred epitaxial growth of the major amount of the silicide. Three different epitaxial orientation relations of the silicide crystals to the substrate were observed. Considering the specific features of the electron diffraction patterns of MnSi the HMS phase was identified as Mn Si .  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All 1.7 4 7 rights reserved. Keywords: Epitaxy; Higher manganese silicide; Silicide; Thin films growth 1. Introduction Much attention has been drawn to the growth of different epitaxial silicide layers on silicon. But, the formation of manganese silicides on silicon has not been investigated extensively yet. Semicon- ducting MnSi with a composition x varying from 1.67 to 1.75 (HMS) are of interest for x thermoelectric applications [1,2]. The differences in the composition x can be explained by the special MnSi structure leading to the existence of a number of the HMS phases. Fig. 1 shows the tetragonal 1.7 unit cell of one of the HMS phases, Mn Si . It consists of four identical tetragonal Mn subcells and 4 7 the Si sublattice with a helix-like arrangement of Si atoms. Whereas the tetragonal Mn subcells are nearly equal for all the HMS, the translational symmetry of the Si atoms varies in c-axis direction for the different HMS phases [3–6]. This means that for all HMS the a-axis length remains the same, but the length of the c-axis differs significantly. Only a few studies on the growth of HMS thin films on Si(001) have been published. They report *Corresponding author. Tel.: 149-371-531-3102; fax: 149-371-531-3077. E-mail address: anna.mogilatenko@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de (A. Mogilatenko). 0167-9317 / 02 / $ – see front matter  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0167-9317(01)00601-3