Study of Structural and Morphological Properties of Vacuum Coated Copper (Cu) Metal Thin Film

Abstract

This study presented a technique to deposit high strength and highly conductive copper thin films on glass substrates at room temperature. In this work, Cu thin films with thicknesses ~500 nm have been deposited on glass substrate by thermal evaporation technique at room temperature. After deposition, these films have been annealed at 200˚C for 10 - 40 minutes. The thickness and annealing effect on the structural and morphological properties were studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) respectively. The results showed that by increasing thickness the copper films crystallinity in (111) direction had been increased. Also by varying the annealing time the significant changes were observed in the films crystallinity and surface morphology.