Room Temperature Deposition of Nanocrystalline SiC Thin Films by DCMS/HiPIMS Co-Sputtering Technique

Due to an attractive combination of chemical and physical properties, silicon carbide (SiC) thin films are excellent candidates for coatings to be used in harsh environment applications or as protective coatings in heat exchanger applications. This work reports the deposition of near-stoichiometric and nanocrystalline SiC thin films, at room temperature, on silicon (100) substrates using a DCMS/HiPIMS co-sputtering technique (DCMS—direct current magnetron sputtering; HiPIMS—high-power impulse magnetron sputtering). Their structural and mechanical properties were analyzed as a function of the process gas pressure. The correlation between the films’ microstructure and their mechanical properties was thoroughly investigated. The microstructure and morphology of these films were examined by appropriate microscopic and spectroscopic methods: atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Raman spectroscopy, while their mechanical and tribological properties were evaluated by instrumented indentation and micro-scratch techniques. The lowest value of the working gas pressure resulted in SiC films of high crystallinity, as well as in an improvement in their mechanical performances. Both hardness (H) and Young’s modulus (E) values were observed to be significantly influenced by the sputtering gas pressure. Decreasing the gas pressure from 2.0 to 0.5 Pa led to an increase in H and E values from 8.2 to 20.7 GPa and from 106.3 to 240.0 GPa, respectively. Both the H/E ratio and critical adhesion load values follow the same trend and increase from 0.077 to 0.086 and from 1.55 to 3.85 N, respectively.