Channeling and backscattering studies of the crystalline perfection and the thermal stability of epitaxial PtSi films on Si

Abstract

Ion‐channeling and backscattering techniques, with some addition of reflection electron‐diffraction analysis, have been employed to study the crystalline perfection and thermal stability of epitaxial PtSi films on (111)Si substrates. It was found that a preferred orientation of crystallites in the films strongly depends on film thicknesses above 300 Å. It was also found that the annealing temperature affects the spread in preferred orientation. The angular and energy‐dependence measurements of backscattering yields have shown that the angular spreads in crystallite orientations in the PtSi films are larger than 0.5° for annealing times of 0.5–8 h, temperatures of 400–750 °C, and film thicknesses of 100–1600 Å. Epitaxial PtSi films on (111)Si are more stable than nonepitaxial ones on (100)Si up to temperatures 100 °C greater. It was concluded that the stability of the epitaxial films originates in the preferred orientation of crystallites in the films.