ICMCTF2012 Session G6-1: Advances in Industrial PVD & CVD Deposition Equipment

Friday, April 27, 2012 8:00 AM in Room Sunrise

Friday Morning

Start	Invited?	Item
8:00 AM	Invited	G6-1-1 Source Technologies for Amorphous Carbon Hard Coatings Richard Welty (Magplas Technik LLC, US) Hard coatings comprising amorphous carbon have become widely commercialized during the last 2 decades in products including automotive components, razor blades, window glass, data disks and heads, water faucet valves, and machining and forming tools. The coatings are deposited by numerous techniques including sputtering, PECVD, cathodic arc evaporation with various degrees of macroparticle filtering, and ion beam deposition using various types of ion sources. Coating properties vary widely according to the deposition technique and process conditions, in particular the energy of the coating flux and the amount of hydrogen incorporated into the coating. The commercial viability of different coating types and processes for a particular application depends in part on the required coating thickness and production rate. In this presentation I will discuss several source technologies for hard amorphous carbon coatings, and factors relating to their use in industrial production equipment.
8:40 AM		G6-1-3 Broadening the application range of HiPIMS coatings in industrial cutting operations Werner Koelker, Oliver Lemmer, Christoph Schiffers, Stephan Bolz (CemeCon AG, Germany) Since it's introduction in the late 1990 years by Vladimir Kouznetsov HiPIMS sputter technology has gained for many years a growing interest in many research activities worldwide. Basic research by many groups on this new and promissing high power sputter technology was very successful. It led to the understanding of many fundamental and specific aspects of the HiPIMS process and plasma conditions. Supported by this growing knowledge CemeCon as an industrial user and supplier of HiPIMS technology drove HiPIMS technology to marketability by developing a powerful and reliable HiPIMS coating machine. In 2010 CemeCon further introduced into the cutting tool market the first HiPIMS coating, named HPN1. Today HPN1 shows promissing market growth and offers higher productivity in a variety of applications especially ranging from medium alloyed steels to spheroidal cast iron and even to challenging materials like nickel-based superalloys. The acceptance of this product in the market shows the needs for further solutions of HiPIMS coatings for cutting tools. The talk will focus on the specific advantages of HiPIMS technology and HiPIMS coatings and gives a status report on the recent application research with respect to cutting operations. It deals with the machining of high performance materials, dedicated cutting edge preperation and optimized wear volume for roughing and finishing operations.
9:00 AM		G6-1-4 Technical challenges and solutions for scaling up of High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HIPIMS) technologies. Jeroen Landsbergen, Frank Papa, Roel Tietema, Michiel Eerden, Thomas Krug (Hauzer Techno Coating, BV, Netherlands) HIPIMS is a technology which has been developed for over the last ten years. Its main advantage being the ability to produce some degree of ionized metal in the plasma which is needed for depositing superior hard coatings. However, the path from laboratory investigation to full integration into large scale production equipment has not been an easy one. Due to the demands on the hardware and due to the generation of pulses into the megawatt range and the sustenance of the bias voltage during such high power pulses, hardware development and integration have taken much time. Specific challenges related to these developments for cathode sizes up to 1800 cm² will be discussed along with some unexpected problems which can occur during HIPIMS processes for certain target materials.
9:20 AM		G6-1-5 S3p™ the HIPIMS approach of Oerlikon Balzers Siegfried Krassnitzer, Markus Lechthaler, Helmut Rudigier (OC Oerlikon Balzers AG, Liechtenstein) High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HIPIMS) has reached a high level of knowledge and understanding, and this technology is now ready to be industrialized. S3p™ - Scalable Pulsed Power Plasma - is the HIPIMS approach of Oerlikon Balzers, which offers full flexibility in terms of applied pulse power density and pulse duration. The degree of ionization can be balanced together with the deposition rate to achieve an optimum between coating properties and productivity. With S3p™ very smooth and dense coatings can be obtained at reasonable batch time, and new options for flexible design of coating structures and materials compositions are opened up. The present work gives an overview on the evolution of coating properties of TiAlN, by a variation of sputter power density and pulse duration. Optical Emission Spectroscopy is used to investigate the plasma properties and to estimate the degree of ionization of the sputtered material. Finally, tools coated with S3p™ coatings, are benchmarked against tools coated with best in class coatings deposited by arc evaporation, and show a remarkable performance.
9:40 AM		G6-1-6 Hybrid - PVD coatings: arc evaporation combined with HIPAC Joerg Vetter, Juergen Mueller, Georg Erkens (Sulzer Metaplas GmbH, Germany) A new class of advanced PVD-coaters, the METAPLAS-DOMINO series , for dedicated coating applications comprise both improved vacuum arc evaporators (APA, Advanced Plasma Assisted) and high power impulse magnetron sputtering sources ( HIPAC - High Ionized Plasma Assisted Coating). The ion cleaning is based on the (AEGD, Arc Enhanced Glow Discharge) process. It ’s possible to run the processes in different modes, e.g. pure APA arc evaporation or pure HIPAC magnetron sputtering. However the combination of the two high ionized deposition processes to generate multilayer, nanomultilayers and nanocomposite layers opens new horizons in tailoring of coating. The arc evaporation itself is limited to specific cathode material properties (mostly metal alloys). HIPAC magnetron sputtering processes can be used to atomize and ionize materials which are difficult to evaporate or not evaporable by cathodic arc, e.g. Si, SiC, WC, TiB₂ and others. Specific features of the PVD system equipped with APA arc evaporators and HIPAC magnetron sources will be shown. First results of hybrid coatings will be presented
10:00 AM		G6-1-7 Towards uniform coating on complex geometries by PVD techniques Tetsuya Takahashi, Rainer Cremer, Peter Jaschinski (KCS Europe GmbH, Germany); Kenji Yamamoto, Satoshi Hirota (Kobe Steel Ltd., Japan) Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) methods such as sputter and cathodic arc processes are in general characterized as a line-of-sight deposition, and hence the uniform coating on substrates having complex geometries by PVD is a challenging task. The present work demonstrates a fast and semi-quantitative method for evaluating the coating homogeneity over a large substrate area. Thin films are deposited using three different PVD techniques of cathodic arc, DC-sputtering, and High Power Pulsed Magnetron Sputtering (HPPMS), and compared in terms of the coating homogeneity and the deposition rate. While the cathodic arc provides a significantly higher deposition rate compared to the others, similar coating distributions are achieved among these deposition techniques. The method presented here contributes towards a fast and efficient optimization of process parameters for PVD coatings on complex geometries.
10:20 AM		G6-1-8 LPPS hybrid Technologies: New Thermal Spray Processes for new emerging Energy Applications Hans-Michael Hoehle (Sulzer Metco Europe GmbH, Germany); Malko Gindrat, Alexander Barth (Sulzer Metco AG (Switzerland), Switzerland) Recent developments in hybrid low pressure thermal spray technologies, such as Plasma Spray-Thin Film (PS-TF), PS-PVD, PS-CVD are being increasingly used to develop functional inorganic coatings and films for emerging high end energy applications. Such applications include protection layers and electrolytic films in SOFC, gas tight mixed electron and ion conducting membranes for gas separation and thin functional layers in photo-voltaic applications. This paper provides a brief overview of the status of developments of several high end emerging energy applications. Beside the applications the basics of these technologies will be described.
10:40 AM		G6-1-9 Development of metal strip cooling equipment for demands of high-rate vacuum coating Jens-Peter Heinß, Peter Lang (Fraunhofer FEP, Germany) Metal strip coating is developing continuously and opens steadily new application fields. Solar heat and thin film photovoltaic are actual examples. From economical reasons the electron beam evaporation is predestined to fit the mass throughput and in the near past a lot of successful developments became known. Fraunhofer FEP is engaged in developments of vacuum coating as well as in additional and ambient processes. High-rate vacuum depositions demand in few cases an effective cooling concept for scooping out their potential. Otherwise substrate or layer temperature exhibits the limiting factor. The technical challenge consists in realizing an effective heat transfer process under high vacuum conditions and was unsolved up to now. Therefore new cooling equipment for vacuum metal strip coating was developed. A description of adapted principles and developed design will be presented. The heat transfer coefficient was extended outgoing from common cooling drum with 50 up to 200 W/m²K for the new designed cooling equipment. We demonstrate several dependencies for the heat transfer coefficient and also first results of adaption of cooling equipment during electron beam deposition of steel strip. The increased cooling efficiency opens new technical capabilities: utilization of very high deposition rates, deposition of thin metal strips and foils, increase of layer thickness, defining of strip temperature during deposition up to keeping it constant during high-rate deposition. We discuss these different performances also in connection with economical consequences.
11:00 AM		G6-1-10 Multiple frequency coupled plasmas for enhanced control of PVD processes Stefan Bienholz, Egmont Semmler, Peter Awakowicz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany) Capacitively coupled plasmas are widely used in PVD processes over several years. Classical single radio frequency capacitively coupled plasmas for PVD processes are nowadays replaced by high rate DC-Magnetron sputter coaters. Nevertheless, both techniques do not allow a separate control of ion flux and its energy distribution at the target, which limits the control range of sputter processes. A possibility to overcome this constriction consists of exciting the plasma at two or even more different radio frequencies simultaneously. Whereas high electron densities and therefore a high ion flux can be achieved by using a very high frequency (VHF) excitation, a lower frequency (HF) excitation gives a certain control over the ion bombarding energy at the target. In this contribution we discuss the possibility of tuning electrical discharge quantities by using multiple excitation frequencies. Especially, the influence of the relative phase between one frequency and its second harmonic on the target voltage waveform and the self bias voltage is investigated, as well as the effect on relevant plasma quantities. Langmuir probe measurements and optical emission spectroscopy are performed to fully characterize the plasma. It is shown, that multiple frequencies capacitively coupled plasmas give an independent control over ion flux and the ion bombarding energy at the target over a wide range. The experiments show, that capacitively coupled multiple frequency plasmas are a promising complement to existing PVD processes. The authors would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the ''Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft'' within the frame of the SFB-TR 87 and the ''Ruhr University Bochum Research School''.