Study of the Preferred Crystallographic Orientation of Polycrystalline Aluminum on Silicon Dioxide and Silicon

Magnetron Physical Vapor Deposition of Aluminum (Al) on single crystal Si (111) at 400 ° C and on oxide at the room temperature are studied by x-ray diffraction and the field-emission scanning electron microscopy. We focused our study on aluminum grain boundary and the grain size. Here the preferred orientation of aluminum film is studied by X-ray diffraction and the grain size is studied by SEM. The preferred orientation of the polycrystalline aluminum is (111) for both aluminum films on both oxide and Si substrate. The FWHM of Al x-ray diffraction indicates that the surface energy from both the oxide and silicon made a good Al (111) preferred orientation. SEM provides us the images of the grain size and their alignment for Al on oxide and Si. It was found that the aluminum crystallites are elongated and perpendicular to the substrate. The poly-crystallite grain size of aluminum is affected by the annealing temperature. The crystallite grain size is bigger at the elevated temperature than the room temperature.