What is arcing in sputtering?
What is arcing in sputtering?
Although arcing occurs in both metal and reactive sputtering, it is more of an issue in the reactive case. Arcing occurs if sufficiently high field strength leads to thermal runaway of an electron emission site. The role of insulating layers and surface potential adjustment through current leakage is highlighted.
What is the sputtering target?
A sputtering target is a material that is used to create thin films in a technique known as sputter deposition, or thin film deposition. As a result, most sputtering target materials are metallic elements or alloys, although there are some ceramic targets available that create hardened thin coatings for various tools.
How do you make a target sputter?
Another way to fabricate the sputtering target is to mix the powders of different metals and sinter the mixture at an elevated temperature under high pressure in a die of required dimensions. This technique of making the target or solid discs from powders is known as spark plasma sintering (SPS).
How long does a sputter target last?
Answer: The life of a sputter target is typically quantified in terms of units of power and time, like kilowatt/hours. For a target being sputtered at 500 watts for a total duty cycle of 100 hours that’s 50 kilowatt/hours.
Where do sputtering takes place?
In physics, sputtering is a phenomenon in which microscopic particles of a solid material are ejected from its surface, after the material is itself bombarded by energetic particles of a plasma or gas. It occurs naturally in outer space, and can be an unwelcome source of wear in precision components.
How plasma is created in sputtering?
A plasma is created by ionizing a sputtering gas (generally a chemically inert, heavy gas like Argon). The sputtering gas bombards the target and sputters off the material we’d like to deposit. Ions can be generated by the collision of neutral atoms with high energy electrons.
How do you make sputtering powder from Target?
You can presss ZnO powder and make ceramic targts by sintering. Pressing Zinc powder needs some expertise. This get into the area known as powder metallurgy, you have to press the powders and sinter them either in vacuum or an inert gas atmosphere to prevent oxidation.
Why is a plasma needed during sputter deposition?
Sputter deposition utilizes an electrically excited gas plasma in a vacuum system. The ions in the plasma are accelerated toward the cathode, which upon bombardment eject neutral atoms from the cathode surface. The ejected atoms collect on all surfaces including the substrate surface.
Why is sputtering important?
An important advantage of sputter deposition is that even materials with very high melting points are easily sputtered while evaporation of these materials in a resistance evaporator or Knudsen cell is problematic or impossible. Sputter deposited films have a composition close to that of the source material.
How does magnetron sputter work?
Magnetron sputtering is a deposition technology involving a gaseous plasma which is generated and confined to a space containing the material to be deposited – the ‘target’. These collisions cause an electrostatic repulsion which ‘knock off’ electrons from the sputtering gas atoms, causing ionization.
What is DC and RF sputtering?
As with DC Sputtering, RF Sputtering runs an energetic wave through an inert gas in a vacuum chamber which becomes ionized. The target material or cathode which is to become the thin film coating is bombarded by these high energy ions sputtering off atoms as a fine spray covering the substrate to be coated.
Why atomic weight of sputtering gas should be close to the atomic weight of target material?
The sputtering gas is often an inert gas such as argon. For efficient momentum transfer, the atomic weight of the sputtering gas should be close to the atomic weight of the target, so for sputtering light elements neon is preferable, while for heavy elements krypton or xenon are used.
What types of sputtering targets do we support?
We support sputtering targets for all fields including TFT, OLED (LTPS: Low-temperature polysilicon) and touch panels. MobileUltrasonic defect testers ensure meticulous quality assurance! FPDanufacturing m equipment sizes are becoming larger and larger so sputtering target dimensions are also increasing.
What could be the reasons of arcing in DC magnetron sputtering?
Arching are usually related to heavy target poisoning, but it could be also due to heavy coating of the ground shield: a strong cleaning of target and ground shield could help What could be the reasons of arcing and surface contamination on Aluminum target in DC magnetron sputtering process?
What is RF sputtering and why is it important?
Because with RF Sputtering the target material is being “cleaned” with each cycle from building up a charge it helps reduce arcing. Arcing is where there is an intensely focused and localized discharge emanates from the target material or cathode into the plasma that creating droplets and problems with non-uniform film deposition.
How do you reduce arcing in DC sputtering?
Compared to conventional DC Sputtering, arcing can be greatly decreased or even eliminated by pulsing the DC voltage in the 10–350 kHz range with duty cycles in the 50–90% range.