The effects of substrate bias, substrate temperature, and pulse frequency on the microstructures of chromium nitride coatings deposited by pulsed direct current reactive magnetron sputtering

Recently, great attention has been devoted to the pulsed direct current (DC) reactive magnetron sputtering technique, due to its ability to reduce arcing and target poisoning, and its capability of producing insulating thin films. In this study, chromium nitride (CrN) coatings were deposited by the bipolar symmetric pulsed DC magnetron reactive sputtering process at different pulse frequency, substrate bias voltage, and the substrate temperature. It was observed that the texture of CrN changed from (111) to (200) as substrate temperature increased to 300°C as deposited at 2 kHz without substrate bias. With increasing pulsing bias and pulse frequency of target, predominated (200) orientation of CrN film was shown due to the ion bombardment/channeling effect to preferentially sputter those unaligned planes. For the CrN coatings deposited with pulsed biasing, the grain size decreased with increasing pulse frequency and substrate bias, whereas the surface roughness showed a reverse trend. The deposition rate of the CrN films decreased with increasing pulse frequency. It was concluded that the pulse frequency, substrate bias, and substrate temperature played important role in the texture, microstructure, and surface roughness of the CrN coatings deposited by the pulsed DC magnetron sputtering process.