Thin Film Deposition of Highly Conductive Metals for Sensor Applications - Phase II

Deposition of highly conductive, continuous thin film metals has proven to be a significant challenge. There are several techniques that allow deposition of these metals, but their application is limited to planar surfaces and only offer complete line of sight deposition. During a recent Phase I STTR project, Summit Information Solutions, Inc. (Summit), in partnership with University of Alabama in Huntsville, demonstrated the capability to deposit sub 10 nm, continuous thin films of silver across silicon substrates with native oxide. Based on this success the Summit team will take this new capability and explore the possibility of depositing these silver thin films in a binary dielectric stack configuration using several different oxide materials. The team will determine the efficacy of depositing silver onto these optical oxides and depositing these oxides onto the silver thin films. Once the deposition characteristics are understood, the team will deposit these binary stacks with varying thickness of each layer to further explore the optical properties available with this technique. At the end of this project the Summit team will provide a new powerful process to the DoD that will allow for the development of optical stacks on arbitrarily complex 3D optical lenses.