Magnetic Thin Film Characterization

An improvement on the fabrication of magnetic thin films is currently on a level of intense research as these films are of great interest in the device industry. Some of these thin films posses high permeability and ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) frequency in the GHz range which are suitable for electromagnetic use. Methods for fabricating these films include sputtering, pulse laser deposition (PLD), sol-gel, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and spin spray process. Spin spray process is a ferrite plating process which involves the direct deposition of ferrite film from aqueous solution at temperature less than 100C. An interest in the spin spray process is due to the fact that fabrication is done at low temperature (which enables the plating of non heat resistance materials) and no vacuum (which decreases the cost of production unlike the other conventional methods). In this research, different types of magnetic thin films were fabricated using the spin spray process. A study into the processing conditions and substrate effect on the films was carried out. Also, characterization of these thin films and their implementations in the device industry was successfully carried out.