Protective diamond-like carbon coatings for future optical storage disks

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) is a promising protective coating for future optical storage technologies. The requirements place conflicting constraints on the nature of the DLC. It must be transparent at 400 nm, hard and wear-resistant, uniform, pinhole-free, have a low stress and be deposited at high rate without a high heat load on a plastic substrate. In order to optimise the films under these constraints, we have studied in detail the band gap, stress, density and Young's modulus of hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) films deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition using a large area electron cyclotron wave resonance source of 14 in. diameter and a variety of hydrocarbon gas sources. We have been able to produce wear-resistant carbon coatings with a high transparency at 400 nm without damaging the plastic disks. We also show that for these films the refractive index can be used as a rapid empirical means of property correlation.