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2011
Conference Paper
Titel
Highly ionised gas-flow sputtering
Abstract
Gas flow sputtering GFS is a PVD technique offering high deposition rates. Due to the hollow cathode no additional magnets for improvement are required. Since, no magnets are included GFS offers an alternative to electroplating especially for deposition of magnetic films. Improvement of the GFS process is expected when running the sources with a pulsed power supply, especially HIPIMS power supplies. For the presented investigations two different HIPIMS power supplies were used to drive the GFS source to create highly ionised pulse plasma gas flow sputtering (HIPP-GFS). Chromium and nickel-iron targets were sputtered and both, DC and HIPP mode are compared. For chromium the basic behaviour was studied, especially the influence of the pulse parameters and working pressure, i.e. the gas flow on the resulting peak current. For NiFe the film properties were compared between DC and HIPP-GFS deposition. The deposition rate in the pulsed mode exceeded the reference DC rate by 25 %. The resulting film structure of the HIPP-GFS films showed an improved columnar growth and a preferred (220) texture of the films. Furthermore the magnetic film properties were modified.