Investigation of film surface roughness and porosity dependence on lattice size in a porous thin film deposition process.

The dependence of film surface roughness and porosity on lattice size in a porous thin film deposition process is studied via kinetic Monte Carlo simulations on a triangular lattice. For sufficiently large lattice size the steady-state value of the expected film porosity has a weak dependence on the lattice size and the steady-state value of the expected surface roughness square varies linearly with lattice size. An analysis of the film morphology based on a stochastic partial differential equation description of the film surface morphology supports and explains the findings of the numerical simulations.