A versatile system for large area coating of nanocomposite thin films

A deposition system process in a vacuum environment has been designed to produce plasma generated nanoparticles of metals, alloys, or inorganic compounds. The system allows coating various substrates with nanoparticle films and with nanocomposite films made of nanoparticles in plasma generated matrix material. The system is composed of a modified gas flow sputter (GFS) source of a hollow cathode type that allows generating metal and inorganic composite particles through a gas phase condensation (GPC) process. A plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) source is used to deposit matrix materials based on organic precursors. The PECVD is a 60 MHz driven pulsed discharge and allows obtaining high deposition rates and a wide variety of the matrix film characters in the range from inorganic compounds to plasma polymers through changes in source parameters and precursors. The design details of the vacuum system and of the plasma sources are reported and the deposition procedure is presented. First results on the generation of metal nanoparticles as a function of the principal discharge parameters of the GFS source are given.