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“Sybilla” equipment has been developed for two decades to propose solutions to the challenges faced by the very promising and expanding field of oxide thin film deposition. The underlying technology named Chemical Beam Vapor Deposition (CBVD) inherits its basic concept from Chemical Beam Epitaxy (CBE), and consists in effusing (in high vacuum conditions) beams of organometallic compounds towards a substrate on which they decompose under energy activation to form the film. The technique enables deposition of multi-element oxides (up to 3 was tested, up to 5 possible), either homogenously or in combinatorial mode (i.e with controlled precursor flow gradient emitted onto the substrate, in good agreement with theoretical model predictions). High homogeneity films can be achieved, even on large substrates (scaling between 150 mm and 450 mm wafer was shown). Precursor decomposition can be initiated either thermally (substrate heating) or by irradiating with energetic beams (laser and electron activations were studied). Additive growth can be obtained by such localized irradiation, or alternatively depositing through shadow masks and benefiting from the line-of-sight nature of the technique (and exploiting the precursor decomposition kinetics not to damage masks). The multi-parameter nature of the deposition technology (precursor nature, different flows, temperature) allows to tune growth rate (from few nm/h to several μm/h) as well as thin film physico-chemical properties (chemical composition, film morphology, crystallinity, etc.) and functional properties. Combinatorial growth reveals a very efficient facility to optimize processes (in one shot, saving time and resources) and address new thin film architectures.
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