Highly adherent carbon nitride (CN x ) films were deposited using a novel pretreatment with two high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) power supplies in a master-slave configuration: one to establish the discharge and one to produce a pulsed substrate bias. During the pretreatment, SKF3 (AISI 52100) steel substrates were pulse-biased in the environment of a HIPIMS Cr plasma in order to sputter clean the surface and to implant Cr metal ions. Subsequently, CN x films were prepared at room temperature by DC unbalanced magnetron sputtering from a high purity graphite target in a N 2 /Ar discharge at 3 mTorr. All processing was done in an industrial CemeCon CC800 system. A series of
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