Correlation between mass-spectrometer measurements and thin film characteristics using dcMS and HiPIMS discharges

Insight on Photocatalytic and Photoinduced Antimicrobial Properties of ZnO Thin Films Deposited by HiPIMS through Thermal Oxidation

“…Several methods have been introduced to synthesize the ZnO thin films, such as chemical vapor deposition [ 10 ], molecular beam epitaxy [ 11 ], sol-gel [ 12 ], pulsed laser deposition [ 13 ], and High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS) [ 14 ]. Among these processes, the HiPIMS technique is a potential approach for developing high-quality thin films due to high-density plasmas with excessive quantities of ionized species, high energy transfer functions, low duty cycles, and long pulse off periods that lead to a substantially lower total heat load to the substrate compared with other methods [ 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”

High quality thermochromic VO2 thin films deposited at room temperature by balanced and unbalanced HiPIMS

“…High power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) is a novel sputtering method, applied recently to the deposition of VO2 films [13,14,15]. It is characterized by a high target current and thus a production of highly energetic sputtered ions [16]. The energy of the deposition flux can be controlled via substrate bias voltage and the large flux of sputtered species provides additional energy increasing the surface diffusion and hence increasing the nucleation density.…”

Phase separation within NiSiN coatings during reactive HiPIMS discharges: A new pathway to grow NixSi nanocrystals composites at low temperature

“…Indeed, reactive HiPIMS discharges, even in the absence of an applied substrate bias, are well-known to provide ion-assisted growth, where the deposited flux is composed to a large fraction of metal ions having an average kinetic ion energies of 15-20 eV and a neutral sputtered flux with a kinetic energy of 2 eV. 57,58 The use of a continuous substrate bias, here -100V, can provide additional kinetic energy (+100 eV) to the incident ions species at the substrate surface, resulting in a higher adatom mobility during the film growth and ultimately leads to a reduction of intracolumnar as well as intercolumnar porosity, as shown by Petrov et al 47 Under such conditions, dense Ni 1-x Si x N y films can be grown even in the absence of substrate heating, which corresponds to zone 3 in the extended structure zone diagram, where energetic ion bombardment is taken into account. 59 Films grown with very low N content, i.e.…”