Preparation process of nickel-vanadium alloy sputtering target
Material Preparation - Vacuum Induction Melting - Chemical Analysis - Forging - Rolling - Annealing - Metallographic Inspection - Machining - Dimensional Inspection - Cleaning - Final Inspection - Packaging
In the fabrication of integrated circuits, pure gold is generally used as interconnect metal, deposited on a silicon wafer, but gold will diffuse into the silicon wafer to form a high-resistance AuSi compound, which will greatly reduce the current density in the wiring, resulting in the failure of entire wiring system.
So, It is proposed to add adhesive layer between the gold thin film and silicon wafers. The adhesive layer is usually made of pure nickel, but diffusion also occurs between the nickel layer and the gold conductive layer, so that a barrier layer is needed to prevent diffusion between the gold conductive layer and nickel adhesive layer.
With a high melting point and a large current density, vanadium is chosen to deposit barrier layer, therefore, nickel sputtering target, vanadium sputtering target, gold sputtering target are all used in the fabrication of integrated circuits.
Nickel vanadium NiV sputtering targets containing 7% vanadium has both advantages of nickel and vanadium, thus adhesive layer and barrier layer can be achieved at a time. NiV alloy is non-magnetic materials, which is conducive to magnetron sputtering. In the electronics information industry, it is gradually replacing pure nickel sputtering targets.
The picture below are two micrographs of our NiV(93/7 wt%) alloy sputtering target, the average grain size<100μm.