Thomas Schütte¹, Jan-Peter Urbach¹, Ralf Bandorf², Holger Gerdes^2
1PLASUS GmbH, Mering, Germany; ² Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Technology and Thin Films IST, Braunschweig, Germany
Successful digitalization of deposition process requires real-time data from a variety of sensors. All data must be collected and saved in a single data base to allow common processing, evaluation and visualization. Especially in-situ data are often rather extensive and complex such as spectral data from spectroscopic plasma monitoring or mass spectroscopy or frequency spectra from electrical probes. Data transfer time as well as data base space usually limit the amount of data which can be transferred from the sensor to the data base in 24/7 production environments. These limits together with proprietary data formats are among the current fundamental barriers to the digitalization of production processes.
Smart and automated in-situ sensors are one solution to overcome these obstacles as they are able to preprocess the large amount of acquired data according to configurable algorithms and evaluation rules in real-time. This results in manageable in-situ parameters which should reflect all main and important properties of the in-situ process data and which allows the transfer to and storage in the data base in accordance with the data from all other sensors.
In this talk, the idea of a smart sensor is demonstrated at a pulsed plasma process application using the in-situ spectroscopic plasma monitoring technique in combination with real-time acquisition of the electrical pulse curves of voltage and current. Real-time evaluation reduces the amount of data considerably without losing the relevant process information.
Examples of HIPIMS applications in production like environments of continuous 24/7 operation are presented and discussed.