Suitable cleaning and handling procedures must be used before placing substrates into the vacuum chamber. Moreover, it is common to incorporate in situ cleaning features like sputter etch into the ...

A method at the core of today’s semiconductor and optical device production, sputtering is used to put down extremely thin films of a material onto a surface, typically referred to as a substrate.

Since the early 1960s, physical vapor deposition (PVD) equipment has been used to fabricate IC circuitry and other sensitive devices. In the 1980s, advances in personal computers enabled PVD ...