In-situ x-ray diffraction during sputter deposition of Ti_1-xAl_xN thin films

Due to improved hardness and oxidation resistance, Ti_1-xAl_xN coatings are constantly displacing TiN in tooling and microelectronic industry. Since the coating’s performance can be further increased by tailoring preferred orientation, an understanding of how deposition parameters influence thin film texture is crucial. The approach used here is in situ x-ray diffraction both in-plane and off-plane during film growth. For this purpose a growth chamber has been installed into the goniometer of the Rossendorf synchrotron BeamLine (ROBL) at the ESRF. Ti_1-xAl_xN films were deposited by reactive co-sputtering from metallic Ti and Al targets, varying substrate temperature, bias voltage and aluminum concentration. In-situ experiments with x~0.1 revealed competitive growth between low surface free energy (002) grains and low strain energy (111) grains parallel to the surface with (002) orientation dominating at higher substrate temperature in accordance with models found in literature. Contrary to pure TiN, here no sub-surface recrystallisation as a driving factor for texture crossover has been observed. Halving the deposition rate led to almost pure (002) fiber texture independent of film thickness pointing towards kinetic restrictions during film growth. Data of current experiments on nano-composite structured Ti_1-xAl_xN with x~0.5 will also be presented at the conference.