Advantages of sputter coating in thin film formation

Sputter coating, also called sputter deposition, is a thin film deposition method that produces films with the highest quality films and excellent precision. When the film thickness and stoichiometry are strictly required, people prefer to use sputter coating. This method has the following advantages.

Higher energy

Sputtering relies on momentum exchange of target materials from the solid phase to the gas phase. The average energy generated by sputter coating is 10 eV, which is about 100 times higher than that of vacuum coating. After deposited on the surface of the substrate, these particles still have enough kinetic energy to migrate on the surface of the substrate, so that the film has good quality and is firmly bonded to the substrate.

Wide application

Any material, even a high-melting material, can be sputter-coated using this method. For alloy target and compound target, it is easy to form a film that has the same ratio as the target composition, and thus sputter coating is widely used.

More uniform film

The incident ions of the sputter coating are generally obtained by a gas discharge method. Sputtered ions often collide with gas molecules in the vacuum chamber before flying to the substrate, so the direction of motion randomly deviates from the original direction. Sputtering is generally ejected from a larger target surface area and is therefore more uniform than that obtained by vacuum coating. For coating parts with grooves, steps, etc., the sputter coating can reduce the difference in film thickness caused by the cathode effect to a negligible extent. However, sputtering at higher pressures will result in more gas molecules in the film.

Precisely controlled

Sputtering can precisely focus and scan the ion beam, change the target and substrate material while maintaining the characteristics of the ion beam, and independently control the ion beam energy and current. Since the energy of the ion beam, the beam size and the beam direction can be precisely controlled, and the sputtered atoms can directly deposit the film without collision, the ion beam sputtering method is suitable as a research method for thin film deposition.

Please visit https://www.sputtertargets.net/ for more information.