Effect of pre-deposition RF plasma etching on wafer surface morphology and crystal orientation of piezoelectric AlN thin films

In this work, we describe the design and operation of a planarized capacitively coupled RF plasma module and investigate the effects of non-reactive RF plasma etching on Si (100) wafer surface morphology and crystal orientation of Al bottom electrodes and subsequently deposited AlN films. To ensure formation of highly (111) textured Al electrode, a thin 25-nm AlN seed layer was grown before the Al deposition. The seed layer´s orientation efficiency improved with increasing the RF power from 70 to 300 W and resulted in narrowing the Al (111) rocking curves. AFM and XRD data have shown that crystal orientations of both the electrode and reactively sputtered AlN film are considerably improved when the substrate micro roughness is reduced from an ordinary level of a few nanometers to atomic level corresponding to root mean square roughness as low as about 0.2 to 0.3 nm. The most perfectly crystallized film stacks of 100-nm Al and 500-nm AlN were obtained in this work using etching in Ar plasma optimized to create an atomically smooth, epi-ready Si surface morphology that enables superior AlN seed layer nucleation conditions. X-ray rocking curves around the Al (111) and AlN (0002) diffraction peaks exhibited extremely low FWHM values of 0.68° and 1.05°, respectively.