SixNy films have been commonly deposited by both PECVD as well as
sputtering.

As you are interested in sputter deposition, there are few papers by
reactive sputtering of stress free SixNy films.

I found the paper by Iwao Sugimoto et all to be very interesting.

[Ref.  Iwao Sugimoto, Satoko Nakano and Keiichi Yanagisawa  in the
Digest of technical papers, Transducers-93, pp.954-957]

These people produced stress free SixNy films on silicon substrate by
using He+N2 and Ne+N2 gas mixtures using silicon target. Addition
of he and ne gases seem to enhance the reactivity of nitrogen at the
same time reducing the internal stresses.

You also find some cross references in this article.

good luck.


Muralidhar








Dr.Muralidhar K. Ghantasala
Department of  Electrical Engineering
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