Residual stress and texture analysis on TaN thin films

In this study, in order to investigate film deposition parameters effect on residual stress and texture properties of radio frequency (RF) reactive magnetron sputtered tantalum nitride (TaN) thin films X-ray diffraction (XRD) θ-2θ scan, residual stress analysis (XRSA), pole figure, grazing incidince wide angle scattering (GIWAXS) techniques were employed. XRSA results revealed that deposited thin films have compressive stresses ranging from 9 GPa to 0.2 GPa depending on deposition conditions. It was observed that some of the films have out-of-plane (non-planar) preferred orientations.