• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2016.02a
• /
• pp.178-178
• /
• 2016

Every display is equipped with a cover glass to protect the underneath displaying devices from mechanical and environmental impact during its use. The strengthened glass such as Gorilla glass.$^{TM}$ has been exclusively adopted as a cover glass in many displays. Conventionally, the strengthened glass has been manufactured via ion-exchange process in wet salt bath at high temperature of around $500^{\circ}C$ for hours of treatment time. During ion-exchange process, Na ions with smaller diameter are substituted with larger-diameter K ions, resulting in high compressive stress in near-surface region and making the treated glass very resistant to scratch or impact during its use. In this study, PIIID (plasma immersion ion implantation and deposition) technique was used to implant metal ions into the glass surface for strengthening. In addition, due to the plasmonic effect of the implanted metal ions, the metal-ion implanted glass samples got colored. To implant metal ions, plasma immersion ion implantation technique combined with HiPIMS method was adopted. The HiPIMS pulse voltage of up to 1.4 kV was applied to the 3" magnetron sputtering targets (Cu, Ag, Au, Al). At the same time, the sample stage with glass samples was synchronously pulse-biased via -50 kV high voltage pulse modulator. The frequency and pulse width of 100 Hz and 15 usec, respectively, were used during metal ion implantation. In addition, nitrogen ions were implanted to study the strengthening effect of gas ion implantation. The mechanical and optical properties of implanted glass samples were investigated using micro-hardness tester and UV-Vis spectrometer. The implanted ion distribution and the chemical states along depth was studied with XPS (X-ray photo-electron spectroscopy). A cross-sectional TEM study was also conducted to investigate the nature of implanted metal ions. The ion-implanted glass samples showed increased hardness of ~1.5 times at short implantation times. However, with increasing the implantation time, the surface hardness was decreased due to the accumulation of implantation damage.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2012.08a
• /
• pp.151-151
• /
• 2012

A new plasma process, i.e., the combination of PIII&D and HIPIMS, was developed to implant non-gaseous ions into materials surface. HIPIMS is a special mode of operation of pulsed-DC magnetron sputtering, in which high pulsed DC power exceeding ~1 kW/$cm^2$ of its peak power density is applied to the magnetron sputtering target while the average power density remains manageable to the cooling capacity of the equipment by using a very small duty ratio of operation. Due to the high peak power density applied to the sputtering target, a large fraction of sputtered atoms is ionized. If the negative high voltage pulse applied to the sample stage in PIII&D system is synchronized with the pulsed plasma of sputtered target material by HIPIMS operation, the implantation of non-gaseous ions can be successfully accomplished. The new process has great advantage that thin film deposition and non-gaseous ion implantation along with in-situ film modification can be achieved in a single plasma chamber. Even broader application areas of PIII&D technology are believed to be envisaged by this newly developed process. In one application of non-gaseous plasma immersion ion implantation, Ge ions were implanted into SiO2 thin film at 60 keV to form Ge quantum dots embedded in SiO2 dielectric material. The crystalline Ge quantum dots were shown to be 5~10 nm in size and well dispersed in SiO2 matrix. In another application, Ag ions were implanted into SS-304 substrate to endow the anti-microbial property of the surface. Yet another bio-application was Mg ion implantation into Ti to improve its osteointegration property for bone implants. Catalyst is another promising application field of nongaseous plasma immersion ion implantation because ion implantation results in atomically dispersed catalytic agents with high surface to volume ratio. Pt ions were implanted into the surface of Al2O3 catalytic supporter and its H2 generation property was measured for DME reforming catalyst. In this talk, a newly developed, non-gaseous plasma immersion ion implantation technique and its applications would be shown and discussed.