Ion Beam Mixing - Analysis

Analysis

The degree of mixing of a film scales with the ion mass, with the intensity of any given incident ion beam, and with the duration of the impingement of the ion beam on a target. The amount of mixing is proportional to the square roots of time, mass and ion dose.

At temperatures below 100 °C for most implanted materials, ion beam mixing is essentially independent of temperature but, as temperature increases beyond that point, mixing rises exponentially with temperature. This temperature-dependence is a manifestation of incident ion beams effectively imparting the target species-dependent activation energy to the barrier layer.

Ballistic ion beam mixing can be classified into two basic subtypes, recoil mixing and cascade mixing, which take place simultaneously as a result of ion bombardment. In recoil mixing, atoms are relocated by single collision events. Recoil mixing is predominately seen at large angles as a result of soft collisions, with the number of atoms undergoing recoil implantation varying linearly with ion dose. Recoil implantation, however, is not the dominant process in ion beam mixing. Most relocated atoms are part of a collision cascade in which recoiled atoms initiate a series of lower energy lattice displacements, which is referred to as cascade mixing. Ion beam mixing can be further enhanced by heat spike effects

Ion mixing (IM) is essentially similar in result to interdiffusion, hence most models of ion mixing involve an effective diffusion coefficient that is used to characterize thickness of the reacted layer as a function of ion beam implantation over a period of time.

The diffusion model does not take into account the miscibility of substrate and layer, so for immiscible or low-miscibility systems it will overestimate the degree of mixing, while for highly miscible systems the model will underestimate the degree of mixing. Thermodynamic effects are also not considered in this basic interdiffusion equation, but can be modeled by equations that consider the enthalpies of mixing and the molar fractions of the target species, and one can thereby develop a thermodynamic effective diffusion coefficient reflecting temperature effects (which become pronounced at high temperatures).