From sputtering to glow discharge
Terje Dokland
dokland at mail.ima.org.sg
Mon May 13 20:39:57 PDT 2002
Thanks to all who have given very helpful advice regarding this. I
just thought I'd share the comments with the list for the benefit of
everybody who might be interested. Hope I got everything right!
Basically, the sputter coater itself works ok as a glow discharge
device, with the side effect of getting gold on your grid. This may
or may not be a problem in practice.
A simple solution may be to reduce the current to 5-10mA (while
normal sputtering is done at >20mA) if it is possible, and increase
the distance between target and grids.
It was also suggested was to remove the gold target and use the steel
or Aluminium underneath or to replace it with either tungsten foil or
titanium.
Also, glow discharge should be done in air with a pressure of
~100mTorr, not in Argon, which is normally used to improve sputtering
efficiency.
Another suggestion was to reverse the polarity, in which case one
would, in effect, be cleaning the grids instead of sputtering metal
onto them. Whether this is possible may depend on the design of the
sputter coating unit.
terje
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