Plasma immersion ion implantation experiments at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil

Historical perspective of the development of PIII devices at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE) is given, together with the description of the present system under operation and our overall results on this three-dimensional implantation research. Starting with an ignitron switched pulser (1 pulse per 3 min) and an intermittent microwave plasma, we improved our PIII system developing a pulse forming network (PFN) based pulser (20 Hz), 2 years later. We also improved our plasma source towards a DC, highly stable, medium density glow discharge system. A much faster hard tube pulser was recently incorporated to our PIII system (670 Hz) allowing us to achieve good implantation results in different materials. Presently, we are testing a recently purchased RUP-4 commercial pulser to obtain arc prevented, 1.1 kHz, square pulses for new experiments in this active field of PIII research.