| AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Advanced Surface Engineering Division | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session SE+PS-TuM |
| Session: | Plasma-assisted Surface Modification and Deposition Processes |
| Presenter: | André Anders, Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), Germany |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Continuous discharges can be characterized by their current-voltage (I-V) characteristics, which expresses the quasi-steady-state plasma impedance for slowly varying parameters of the driving circuit. For fast and strongly changing conditions, the plasma impedance may become a strong function of time and therefore one needs to explicitly add time as a parameter, leading to current-voltage-time (I-V-t) characteristics .
This general approach is applicable to magnetron sputtering, where the magnetron’s I-V characteristic is a power law, I = K Vn, with K being a device-specific constant and the power exponent n typically in the range from 6 to 10. For HiPIMS, the current is a strong function of time, and one needs to consider I-V-t characteristics [1]. In the special case when HiPIMS pulses have similar pulse shapes I(t) at various voltages, one may reduce the description to peak current - voltage characteristics and arrive again at a power law Ip = K Vn , this time with n in the range between 1 and 2. Most interesting, however, is the case when the I(t) curves are more complicated because they contain additional information. Since the appearance of publication [1] more than a decade ago we have learned a lot about HiPIMS, such as the relative importance of self-sputtering and gas recycling [2], leading to a more unified model [3]. In this contribution, I-V-t characteristics are revisited in light of today’s knowledge.
Acknowledgments: The experimental data for this work were primarily generated during the tenure of the author at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California.
[1] A. Anders, J. Andersson, A. Ehiasarian, J. Appl. Phys. 102 (2007) 113303.
[2] A. Anders, J. Čapek, M. Hála, L. Martinu, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 45 (2012) 012003.
[3] N. Brenning, J.T. Gudmundsson, M.A. Raadu, T.J. Petty, T. Minea, D. Lundin, Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 26 (2017) 125003.