This project was inspired by natural materials such as Nacre which have a stiff (but brittle) ceramic phase held together by a soft polymeric phase. Ceramic phase provides stiffness, while polymeric phase is able to accommodate strain & contribute to toughness. Polymeric phase is substituted by metals in Metal-Ceramic Multilayers (MCM) as it is considerably difficult to deposit polymers at the nano/micro scale. We want to leverage the stiffness of ceramics and the toughness of metals in MCM. Deposition of TiN is done by using a Titanium (Ti) sputtering target biased such that it led to a power dissipation of 225 Watt DC. A combination of Argon (Ar) and Nitrogen (N2) gas in then introduced the the chamber in varying proportions. The resultant gas chamber pressure that led to successful deposition was found to be between 1.8 to 2.0 mTorr (i.e. 0.24 to 0.27 Pa) at room temperature. Different permutations and combinations of substrates, gas ratio, pressure, temperature, wattage, etc was tried before I could deposit TiN films on glass. I like to say that I found 100 different ways in which TiN could not be deposited – which was a part of my learning. I also could not reproduce an earlier recipe to deposit TiN tried in our group which used Ar:N2 ration of 20:1 – for a variety of reasons I’d like to avoid mentioning here. Sharing some visuals from this project: