Large-area pretreatment for physical vapor deposition

Illustrated by the coating of strip steel and plate glass, we discuss the possibilities of matching the vacuum pretreatment to the high coating rates of large-area physical vapor deposition. The restricted applicability of conventional plasma pretreatment methods has led to the concept of interfacial (IFL) processing. This is meant to be a method by which remaining contamination layers and adsorbates on the substrate surface are converted into a useful (often plasma activated) intermediate layer.