Study on Characteristic Properties of Annealed SiOC Film Prepared by Inductively Coupled Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition

A SiOC film made by inductively coupled plasma chemical vapor deposition at radio-frequency power of 800 W with the precursor methyltrimethoxysilane was analyzed to find out the dielectric constant that was caused by the polarization. The dielectric constant was obtained by C-V measurement using the structure of the Al/SiOC fllm/p-Si substrate. The peak shift observed in the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer for the film was closely related to the bond structure of Si-O-C, in which the blue shift of Si-O-C was due to the increased intensity of the bond Si-O-Si at the right shoulder in the main bond range of 940-1220 cm^-1. As the intensity of the peak Si-O-Si increases, the dielectric constant, the thickness, and the roughness decrease with the increment of hardness and modulus. However, the very little carbon content under 5% based on the SiO² film decreases the polarity in the final film and then enhanced the surface flatness. Moreover, the dielectric constant decreases by lowering polarization, which contributes to increasing the hardness and reducing the thickness, depending on how carbocations recombine with other broken segments of precursor molecules and depending on the stabilization by the dispersion of Si-O-Si on the surface of the substrate. The space effect due to the steric hindrance of terminal Si-CH₃ or Si-OCH₃ bond with pieces of the alkyl group induces to increase the thickness of the SiOC film by producing nanocavities inside the thin film.