Chemical compositions and optical properties of HfOxNy thin films at different substrate temperatures

High-k HfOxNy thin films have been grown by radio frequency (rf) reactive sputtering of metal Hf target in N2/Ar/O2 ambient at different substrate temperatures. The chemical compositions of the films have been investigated as a function of substrate temperature by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). XPS measurements showed that nitrogen concentration increases with an increase in substrate temperature. Room-temperature spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) with photon energy 0.75–6.5 eV was used to investigate the optical properties of the films. SE results demonstrated that refractive index n increases with an increase in substrate temperature. Based on TL parameters which were obtained from the best fit results used in a simulation of the measured spectra, meanwhile, we conclude that the energy band gap (Eg) decreases with an increase in substrate temperature.