The Chemical Route in Plasma Enhanced Low Pressure Synthesis of c-BN

Abstract

In the last three years it was shown that plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) is an interesting alternative to the physical route. This contribution reviews the state of the art in PECVD of c-BN and discusses some open questions in the first part. In the second part results are given of sputter/etch rates experiments of c-BN in comparison with h-BN for argon, hydrogen and fluorine species. In H₂ no selectivity in etch rate could be found between c-BN and h-BN while in CF₄ indications for etch selectivity were found depending on bias voltage. For a certain deposition parameter range c-BN films with relatively low stress were deposited. Grazing Incidence X-ray Diffraction shows clearly that the film consists of polycristalline c-BN.