Influence of substrate bias on the microstructure and internal stress in Cu films deposited by filtered cathodic vacuum arc

A novel off-plane double bend filtered cathodic vacuum arc technique at ambient temperature was used to deposit copper films. The film's structure and surface morphology were characterized using X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy. The influence of substrate bias on grain size, internal stress, surface morphology and crystalline structure was also studied. It was found that the deposited Cu films exhibits face-centred cubic-type (fcc) crystallite structure with preferred orientation growth. The surface roughness and grain size increases with increasing substrate bias.