Exploring ionised metal flux fraction in magnetron sputtering: Insights from laboratory and industrial applications

Abstract

Magnetron sputtering is one of the cornerstones of thin film-forming methods. The literature provides excessive knowledge about inner plasma processes, deposition control and thin film growth, but the overwhelming majority reports on results conducted on a small lab scale. To transfer this knowledge and use it in industrial applications, one has to overcome many challenges, the most profound being scaling the process from the lab scale towards a large industrial scale. This paper explores the critical differences in deposition fluxes and ionisation of metals when scaling from lab to industrial systems. While in the laboratory, the direct current magnetron sputtering does not create sufficient metal ions, this is dramatically different in the industrial system, where up to 30% of the film-forming species detected were ions. Additionally, the deposition rate in the industrial system was about one order of magnitude higher compared to the laboratory system.