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Monitoring of stress–strain evolution in thin films by reflection anisotropy spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray diffraction

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Abstract

With progressing miniaturization of modern electronic devices, interconnects become increasingly smaller. Additionally, as electronic devices move away from rigid substrates toward flexible ones, understanding their mechanical and structural stability is becoming crucial. In this work, a thorough mechanical characterization of copper thin films deposited on flexible substrates was performed with two techniques, namely well-established synchrotron X-ray diffraction (sXRD) and the rather new usage of reflectance anisotropy spectroscopy (RAS) for mechanical characterization of thin films. The comparison of these two techniques shows that RAS can be reliably used for the accurate and prompt yield stress measurements. The acquisition time of RAS is much faster than that of sXRD: 1 second per data point compared to several seconds per data point for sXRD experiments. Moreover, the signal-to-noise ratio of the RAS data is much higher than that of the sXRD. Our results show that yield stress of Cu films increases with the decrease in the film thickness, going from 352 MPa for a 500 nm films to 793 MPa for a 50 nm thick film. Microstructure analyses of the films by electron microscopy allowed correlation of the mechanical behavior of the films to their grain morphologies. We have shown that RAS can supplement sXRD measurements due to a faster acquisition rate which allowed us to analyze the creep behavior of our copper thin film at different strain rates.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Franziska Schlich for sputter deposition of the thin films. Synchrotron experiments were carried out at the MS beamline (X04SA) of the Swiss Light Source, PSI Villigen, Switzerland. The authors thank Antonio Cervellino for his technical support. The authors thank the FIRST Center for Micro- and Nanoscience at ETH Zurich for the use of the sputter tool, Dr. Thomas Weber from the X-ray Platform at Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, for helping with the experiments and for fruitful discussions and ScopeM Scientific Center for Optical and Electron Microscopy for the use of the facilities. Andreas Wyss and Nilesha Mishra acknowledge funding by the Helmholtz Gemeinschaft in the form of Helmholtz Virtual Institute VI530.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Nanometallurgy, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 5, 8093, Zurich, Switzerland

    Andreas Wyss, Alla S. Sologubenko & Ralph Spolenak

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Applied Materials, P.O. Box 3640, 76021, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Nilesha Mishra & Patric A. Gruber

Authors
  1. Andreas Wyss
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  2. Alla S. Sologubenko
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  3. Nilesha Mishra
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  4. Patric A. Gruber
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  5. Ralph Spolenak
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Correspondence to Ralph Spolenak.

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Wyss, A., Sologubenko, A.S., Mishra, N. et al. Monitoring of stress–strain evolution in thin films by reflection anisotropy spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray diffraction. J Mater Sci 52, 6741–6753 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-0909-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-0909-9

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