Electron-beam physical vapor deposition

Electron-beam physical vapor deposition, or EBPVD, is a form of physical vapor deposition in which a target anode is bombarded with an electron beam given off by a charged tungsten filament under high vacuum. The electron beam causes atoms from the target to transform into the gaseous phase. These atoms then precipitate into solid form, coating everything in the vacuum chamber (within line of sight) with a thin layer of the anode material. Thin-film deposition is a process applied in the semiconductor industry to grow electronic materials, in the aerospace industry to form thermal and chemical barrier coatings to protect surfaces against corrosive environments, in optics to impart the desired reflective and transmissive properties to a substrate and elsewhere in industry to modify surfaces to have a variety of desired properties. The deposition process can be broadly classified into physical vapor deposition (PVD) and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In CVD, the film growth takes place at high temperatures, leading to the formation of corrosive gaseous products, and it may leave impurities in the film. The PVD process can be carried out at lower deposition temperatures and without corrosive products, but deposition rates are typically lower. Electron-beam physical vapor deposition, however, yields a high deposition rate from 0.1 to 100 μm/min at relatively low substrate temperatures, with very high material utilization efficiency. The schematic of an EBPVD system is shown in Fig 1. In an EBPVD system, the deposition chamber must be evacuated to a pressure of at least 7.5 Torr (10−2 Pa) to allow passage of electrons from the electron gun to the evaporation material, which can be in the form of an ingot or rod. Alternatively, some modern EBPVD systems utilize an arc-suppression system and can be operated at vacuum levels as low as 5.0 Torr, for situations such as parallel use with magnetron sputtering. Multiple types of evaporation materials and electron guns can be used simultaneously in a single EBPVD system, each having a power from tens to hundreds of kilowatts.