Review of cathodic arc deposition technology at the start of the new millennium

The vacuum cathodic arc has been known as a means of producing coatings since the second half of the 19th century. This makes it one of the oldest known vacuum coating techniques. In the last century it has been recognized that the copious quantities of ions produced by the process provides certain coating property advantages. Specifically, ions can be steered and/or accelerated toward the parts to be coated. This, in turn, can provide enhanced adhesion, film density, and composition stoichiometry in the case of compound coatings. The ions generated by the cathodic arc have high ‘natural’ kinetic energy values in the range 20–200 eV, leading to enhanced surface mobility during the deposition process and even ion subplantation. In many cases, dense coatings are achieved even when the ions arrive at non-normal angles. The ion energy can be further manipulated by the plasma immersion biasing technique. Macroparticle contamination has been alleviated by a variety of novel plasma filters. The purpose of this review is to describe recent developments in macroparticle filtering and arc control. These developments promise to broaden the range of applications to the semiconductor, data storage, and optical coatings industry.