Influence of a Revolutionary Substrate on Hysteresis Effect in Reactive Sputtering Deposition of Vanadium Oxide

Reactive sputter processes frequently exhibit stability problems. The cause of this is that these processes normally exhibit hysteresis effects in the processing curves. Eliminating or decreasing the hysteresis would significantly simplify the use of reactive sputtering processes. In this work, we present reactive sputtering deposition modeling of vanadium oxide with a revolutionary substrate, aiming to study the influence of it on hysteresis effect. Based on this modeling, the fractions of V, V2O3, VO2, V2O5 at the target surface and target voltage have been investigated as a function of reactive gas flow during the reactive sputtering. The substrate area was replaced by a new parameter of effective area of substrate As which was calculated as a sum of contributions from the substrate area at each cell of time. From the modeling results, it is suggested that the effective area of the substrate was reduced for reactive sputtering with revolutionary substrate, thus the hysteresis width would be decreased. This has been experimentally verified by reactive sputtering deposition of VOx. Besides, the fundamental explanation to this behavior as well as the experimental verification is presented.