Abstract
Inductively coupled plasma reactive sputtering technique has been applied to grow highly oriented aluminum nitride on Si(111) at high process pressure. An inductive coil of 3 and 1/4 turns was introduced to generate a plasma zone near the substrate holder, which provides additional energy to the radicals inside the plasma zone. The full width at half-maximum of the X-ray rocking curve of AlN(0002) is reduced from 7.90° to 4.05° when the inductive coil power is raised from 0 to 180 W. The enhancement of the c-axis texture of AlN is attributed to the increase of the density of the sputtered Al atoms of high energy. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.