AVS 50th International Symposium
    Vacuum Technology Wednesday Sessions
       Session VT-WeP

Paper VT-WeP7
Plasma Sensors for Control of PVD Processes for Nanostructured Me-C:H Coatings@footnote 1@

Wednesday, November 5, 2003, 11:00 am, Room Hall A-C

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: C.C. Klepper, HY-Tech Research Corporation
Authors: C.C. Klepper, HY-Tech Research Corporation
E.P. Carlson, HY-Tech Research Corporation
R.C. Hazelton, HY-Tech Research Corporation
E.J. Yadlowsky, HY-Tech Research Corporation
M.A. Taher, Caterpillar, Inc.
B. Feng, Caterpillar, Inc.
B. Shi, Louisiana State University
W.J. Meng, Louisiana State University
Correspondent: Click to Email
To improve the reproducibility of metal-containing amorphous hydrogenated carbon (Me-C:H) coatings deposited by physical vapor deposition (PVD) techniques such as reactive sputtering, various plasma probes are of interest as in-situ sensors integrated with a closed-loop deposition control system.@footnote 2,3@ In a series of Design-of-Experiment (DoE) test runs on an unbalanced magnetron sputtering setup, various plasma probes were tested for their sensitivity to process input factors and as candidates for a feed-back control system. These include optical emission and absorption spectroscopy of metal atoms, conventional and electron emissive Langmuir probes (LP), and hydrogen atomic line emission (H@alpha@). Of particular interest are combinations of the outputs of these probes. For example, the H@alpha@, divided by the product of the electron density from the LP and the hydrogen partial pressure from a residual gas analyzer (RGA), can be used as a measure of the excitation temperature of the plasma. This factor scales differently from the electron temperature from the LP, which is representative of the cold component that dominates the electron energy distribution function in low-T plasmas. The plasma potential measured from the LP is also of interest, since it, together with the applied substrate bias, determines the energy of ionic species bombarding the substrate. This measurement is primarily sensitive to plasma composition, especially in the reactive phase. Details and interpretation of these dependences, as well as their importance in the design of the closed-loop control system, will be presented. @FootnoteText@@footnote 1@ Partial support for this project came from NIST ATP 70NANBH0H3048 through a subcontract with Caterpillar Inc.@footnote 2@ M. A. Taher, et al., contributed talk in this conference. @footnote 3@ B. Shi, W. J. Meng, Journal of Applied Physics, in press (2003).