Gun Hwan Lee, Korea Institute of Materials Science, Changwon, Korea
Multi-component ceramic coatings such as TiN, CrN, TiAlN, TiCrN, TiCrSiN and Hard carbon coatings (HCC) were used in wide range of industrial applications, as these have excellent mechanical, chemical and biological properties. These coatings were synthesized by the vapour-phase method from an arc ion plating process. PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) coating technologies were commonly used in carrying out ceramic coatings, where the coating materials are vaporized from the source and then transported in the form of a vapour through a vacuum or plasma environment to the substrates.
Arc ion plating technology is widely used to manufacture ceramic coating layers using arc plasma. One of the most important problems with the arc ion plating process is that there is no way to measure the deposition rate. Currently, the most widely used QCM (Quartz Crystal Microbalance) method is influenced by strong arc plasma and cannot be used in this process.
The new deposition control technology was developed based on plasma monitoring (OES) of arc plasma depending on the type of target materials and the input power. In this study, the deposition process could be controlled very precisely by applying the technology that can measure the deposition rate in the in-situ state using the arc plasma monitoring technology. We were able to establish data on deposition thickness control using this new concept of deposition rate measuring device for various deposition materials and deposition processes. In particular, it was possible to accurately measure a deposition rate of a ceramic thin film with excellent abrasion resistance such as TiN, CrN, etc. in an in-situ state, and we have confirmed that it could be used for a long deposition time over than 50hrs. We were able to accurately control various ceramic films with the desired thickness using this ultra-long lifetime deposition rate measurement technique.