Fabrication of complex oxide microstructures by combinatorial chemical beam vapour deposition through stencil masks

Chemical Beam Vapour Deposition is a gas phase deposition technique, operated under high vacuum conditions, in which evaporated chemical precursors are thermally decomposed on heated substrates to form a film. In the particular equipment used in this work, different chemical beams effuse from a plurality of punctual precursor sources with line of sight trajectory to the substrate. A shadow mask is used to produce 3D-structures in a single step, replicating the apertures of a stencil as deposits on the substrate. The small gap introduced between substrate and mask induces a temperature difference between both surfaces and is used to deposit selectively solely on the substrate without modifying the mask, taking advantage of the deposition rate dependency on temperature. This small gap also enables the deposition of complex patterned structures resulting from the superposition of many patterns obtained using several precursor beams from different directions through a single mask aperture. A suitable process parameter window for precursor flow and substrate temperature is evidenced to maximize resolution. •Micro-feature growth with stencil mask by Chemical Beam Vapour Deposition•Growth of complex structured oxide films in one step•The gap between substrate and mask avoids deposition on the stencil.•Fabrication of 3D structures by superposing deposits from several beams•The versatile setup combines few chemical beams, variable geometry and stencil mask patterns.