Applied Surface Science 54 (1992) 75-77 North-Holland applied surface science Reactive pulsed laser deposition of TiN D. Craciun and V. Craciun Institute of A tomic Physics, Bucharest, Romania Received 27 May 1991; accepted for publication 31 May 1991 Pulsed laser radiation has been successfully employed for thin film titanium nitride deposition. A pure titarüum target was reactively evaporated in a nitrogen atmosphere by a 4 J/cm 2, 20 ns KrF laser pulse. The properties of the thin deposited films are studied. 1. Introduction The excellent high-temperature stability, hard- ness, corrosion resistance and electrical properties provide TiN many applications from cutting tools and aesthetic coatings to VLSI microelectronics [I]. TiN films can be obtained by a large number of different techniques such as physical vapor de- position [2], ion implantation [3], chemical vapor deposition [4], or laser treatment [5,6]. The most widely used deposition methods are reactive evaporation [7,8] and reactive sputtering [9,10] whereby pure titanium is either evaporated or sputtered in the presence of a certain nitrogen pressure. Recently, the pulsed laser evaporation tech- nique has gained prominence in the fabrication of new high-T c superconducting thin films [11,12]. In this paper, an application of this technique for titanium nitride deposition is presented. A pure titanium target is pulsed laser evaporat- ed in a nitrogen atmosphere. Different investiga- tion techniques have shown that the deposited films consist of titanium mononitride [6,9,14,15]. 2. Experimentai details Titanium targets of 99.9% purity were ¢leaned with alcohol, rinsed with deionized water, dried in a nitrogen jet, and then immediately loaded into the deposition system. The vacuum chamber was evacuated down to 10 -» Torr, purged with nitrogen, evacuated again, and then filled with 99.99% purity nitrogen. After several trials, the nitrogen pressure was set in the 1 to 20 Torr range. The target was oriented as usual for laser de- position at an angle of 45 ° to the incident excimer (KrF~ X = 248 nm) laser beam. Laser fluences from 3 to 6 J/cm 2, at a repe- tition rate of 20 Hz were used. The evaporated material was deposited onto a silicon substrate placed parallel and at a distance of about 4 cm away from the target. Thin de- posited films were examined first by an optical microscope and then by a scanning electron mi- croscope (SEM), also equipped with an energy dispersive analysis system (EDAX). The thickness and composition were de- termined by Rutherford backscattering spec- troscopy (RBS) using 3.1 MeV He + ions and a detector angle of 165 ° The elemental and chemical composition of the deposited films were investigated by X-ray photo- electron spectroscopy (XPS) with a VG-ESCA- LAß MK II spectrometer. The A1Ka X-ray line was used as exciting radiation at a background pressure of 4 × 10-1° Torr. Because the surface of the investigated nitrides partly consists of oxides or oxynitrides, an Ar + 0169-4332/92/$05.00 © 1992 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved