Case S11: Cylindrical magnetron source for linear substrate motion
In this example we show modeling of a non-planar magnetron source for coating a substrate that moves in a fixed direction, as being carried by a conveyor.
To be modeled is a cylindrical magnetron source, whose sputtering surface is in constant rotation to achieve good material utilization. The source file is created in an independent program and is imported into V-Grade 5S. The modeled substrate is 50 cm in width.
The intrinsic thickness uniformity over the substrate width of 50 cm is 4.25%, the associated material collection efficiency being 58%. To improve the thickness uniformity one can install an aperture that trims the excess thickness in reference to the edges. The aperture is modeled through a negative mask in V-Grade 5S. An optimized mask shape was found through first manually adjusting the edges and then employing the automatic mask optimizer of V-Grade 5S. With the aperture, the thickness uniformity improves to 0.49% with a material collection efficiency of 55%.
The thickness distributions with and without the aperture are shown in the plot below.
