Simulation of Fabrication toward High Quality Thin Films for Robotic Applications by Ionized Cluster Beam Deposition

The most commonly used method for the production of thin films is based on deposition of atoms or molecules onto a solid surface. One of the suitable method is to produce high quality metallic, semiconductor and organic thin film is Ionized cluster beam deposition (ICBD), which are used in electronic, robotic, optical, optoelectronic devices. Many important factors such as cluster size, cluster energy, impact angle and substrate temperature have important effects on the quality of final thin film such as cluster implanted atoms, substrate sputtering atoms and surface roughness. In this paper, molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of nano-Si cluster impact on Si(100) substrate surface has been carried out for energies of 1-5 eV/atom. The 3-body Stillinger-Weber potential (SW) was used in this simulation. Si cluster sizes of 30, 70, and 160 atoms were deposited on a Si (100) substrate whose temperatures were set around 300 K. Our results illustrate that the maximum substrate temperature, heat transferred time, the cluster implantation and sputtering atoms from the surface increase with increasing the cluster size and energy of the clusters. We found that small nano-clusters with high kinetic energy can produce flatter surface.

Keywords:

Molecular dynamics simulation , Ionized cluster beam deposition , Thin films