Coating (Sputtering)

Sputtering is a method for coating substrates in a vacuum environment.

To deposit sputter coatings the coating material is placed inside a vacuum coating system as a solid “target”.  Argon plasma is ignited in the vacuum chamber with the target as anode of the plasma discharge. This leads to a heavy bombardment of the target surface with Argon ions. As a consequence material is sputtered from the target surface into gaseous phase, from which it condensates on the substrate surface.
One major advantage of the sputter deposition method is the ability to coat substrates at low process temperatures.

Coating system at RCMT

• „Oerlikon LLS EVO“  twin chamber sputtering system with recipe based automated process control
• Load lock chamber: loading + preconditioning of substrates (evacuation, degassing, RF plasma etching) Coating chamber: 5 planar magnetron sputter sources, power consumption: max. 5 kW pulsed DC (0 – 350 kHz) per sputter source, co-sputtering of two materials possible.
• Sputter modes:

Metallic mode (Ar process gas)

Reactive mode (O₂ or N₂ addition)

Services

• Vacuum coating of wafers and other planar substrates using sputter deposition
• Maximum substrate size: 8" / 200 mm
• Maximum substrate thickness: 15 mm (other special geometries to be discussed)
• Available coating materials: Al, Cr, Cu, Ni, Si, Ti and their oxides / nitrides (if applicable)
• Process temperatures: 35 - 200 °C
• Coating thickness: 5 nm - 5 µm (Thickness > 1 µm to be discussed)

Fields of application

• Metallization for Lift-off processes (Lithography)
• Adhesion / start layers for electroplating
• Masking for RIE / DRIE processes
• Metallization for R&D applications in general

• Insulating / dielectric films