Rafael Sanchez¹, Johan Böhlmark¹, Jacob Törngren¹, Daniel Lundin^1,2
1Ionautics AB, Öjebyn, Sweden
² Plasma and Coatings Physics, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
High power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) is a PVD technology that has been developed during the last 25 years, and the technology is gradually finding more and more applications in the PVD industry. HiPIMS is today a well-established technology with a significant market share in the cutting tool industry. It is expected that HiPIMS will make a similar journey in other niches of PVD. The constant development of advanced materials and thin films puts an increasing demand on process control in order to obtain reproducible coatings with maintained high performance. In addition, more and more complex material systems are introduced, which has increased the challenge to stably operate at the desired process point. All this combined creates a need for accurate and fast process control systems. Preferably such control systems should be of the non-invasive type so that the plasma discharge is not affected by the measurement. One example of such non-invasive process control systems is to measure the electrical response of the plasma discharge and use that information to control the HiPIMS discharge conditions in real time. Another example is to use optical emission spectroscopy (OES) to measure the optical properties of the plasma emission and use this as feedback signal to the HiPIMS power supplies. Ionautics can offer both types of hardware solutions and in this presentation the technical solutions and the functionalities are presented. In one example the control feature is built into the power supply and being used to regulate stoichiometry. In another example, Ionautics has been collaborating with Plasus and Robeko to combine state-of-the-art time-resolved OES with our latest HiPIMS power supplies to regulate the HiPIMS plasma discharge and maintain plasma chemistry.