D. A. L. Loch1, A. W. Oniszczuk2
1TRUMPF Hüttinger GmbH & Co. KG, Freiburg, Germany
2TRUMPF Huettinger sp. z. o. o, Zielonka, Poland
High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HIPIMS) has evolved from its experimental beginnings to an increasingly important tool to improve coating performance, enhance coating properties or to deposit films that are not possible to achieve with other techniques. HIPIMS films can now be found in many applications of daily life, quite literally from the morning shave to space exploration.
There are many great workshops to give you an understanding of how HIPIMS works and what it is capable of, however getting HIPIMS to work with your system and to your expectations is a different challenge.
In this work we will present some considerations to take into account, when starting as a novice HIPIMS user taking the first steps into HIPIMS process implementation.
Successful implementation of the HIPIMS process into an existing system can be tricky and can depend on the user’s background knowledge, the available analytical facilities, the chosen material, down to the amount of time that is allocated for the first tests.
Depending on if you come from the sputtering world or arc evaporation, your own well-known tools to solve challenging depositions may have a different effect when using HIPIMS.
As a DC sputtering specialist, you are confronted with a flux of metal ions that change the properties of your films or reduce the amount of material arriving at the substrate, from an arc process the pulsed ion flux mixed with neutral metal atoms behave different to an all-ionised species-based process and may require you to think about a pulsed bias. .
All too often, the initial experiments don’t show the expected improvement, and this leads to many question marks about the technology. It is therefore critical to begin with a clear understanding of the system where HIPIMS capability is to be tested. How is the magnetron configured? What is the size of the target? These are just the obvious questions.