What is Physical Vapour deposition? How Does Physical Vapour Deposition Work?

Physical vapour deposition (PVD) is fundamentally a vaporisation coating technique, involving transfer of material on an atomic level. It is an alternative process to electroplating The process is similar to chemical vapour deposition (CVD) except that the raw materials/precursors, i.e. the material that is going to be deposited starts out in solid form, whereas in CVD, the precursors are introduced to the reaction chamber in the gaseous state. It incorporates processes such as sputter coating and pulsed laser deposition (PLD).

According to the "Coherent Market Insights" Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis of Physical Vapor Deposition Market.

Physical Vapour Deposition Market

How Does Physical Vapour Deposition Work?

PVD processes are carried out under vacuum conditions. The process involved four steps:

Evaporation

During this stage, a target, consisting of the material to be deposited is bombarded by a high ebergy source suchg as a beam of electrons or ions. This dislodges atoms from the surface of the target, ‘vaporising’ them.

 

Transport

This process simply consists of the movement of ‘vaporised’ atoms from the target to the substrate to be coated and will generally be a straight line affair.

 

Reaction

In some cases coatings will consist of metal oxides, nitrides, carbides and other such materials. In these cases, the target will consist of the metal. The atoms of metal will then react with the appropriate gas during the transport stage. For the above examples, the reactive gases may be oxygen, nitrogen and methane.

 

In instances where the coating consists of the target material alone, this step would not be part of the process.

Depeding on the actual process, some reactions between target materials and the reactive gases may also take place at the substrate surface simultaneously with the deposition process.