1. Diamond-like carbon for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) applications
- Author
-
Chua, D. H. C.
- Subjects
621.3 - Abstract
This work investigates Diamond-like Carbon thick and thin films for applications in Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). As such, this work intends to combine 2 highly specialized but independent research issues. In the field of diamond and related materials, there are many types of diamond-like carbon films. In this work, nonhydrogenated tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) and amorphous Carbon (a-C) types of diamond-like carbon films were investigated. High density ta-C films have been deposited with Young's modulus of ~750GPa, density of 3.4 g/cm
3 and optical gap of 3.9eV. After gaining a thorough understanding of basic ta-C growth and characterization, the next step was to increase the film thickness. Previously, the thickness of these films was limited due to the intrinsic compressive residual stress of ~9 GPa. In this section, various methods of thick film deposition were investigated, including thermal annealing, soft underlayer substrates, substrate biasing and hybrids consisting of two or more of the above. Substrate biasing using a pulsed and high voltage is a unique technique known as plasma ion immersion implantation (PHI). Films deposited by PHI had lower sp3 content and thus are labeled amorphous Carbon (a-C). These films have been tested to have residual stress- Published
- 2005