Synthesis of unattainable ion implantation profiles — ‘Pseudo-implantation’

Abstract

Metal implantation provides a powerful tool for the formation of non-equilibrium alloy layers for a wide variety of basic and applied materials applications, but the technique is fundamentally limited in two important ways: (i) the implanted species concentration is limited by sputtering of the modified layer by the incident ion beam itself, and the sputter-limited retained dose is often disappointingly low; (ii) the thickness of the modified layer is limited by the maximum ion energy available, and for practical reasons (implanter voltage) the layer thickness is often just a few hundred ångströms. We describe here a metal-plasma-immersion-based method for synthesizing non-equilibrium alloy layers of arbitrarily high dopant concentration and of arbitrary thickness. By repetitively pulse biasing the substrate to high negative voltage while it is immersed in the metal plasma from a vacuum arc plasma gun, a layer can be synthesized that is atomically mixed into the substrate with an interface width determined by the early-time bias voltage and with a thickness determined by the overall duration of the process. The species is that of the vacuum arc cathode material, which for this purpose can be a mixture of the substrate metal and the wanted dopant metal. We have used the method to form a high concentration Ta layer on the copper rails of an electromagnetic rail gun, with total surface area treated about 3000 cm 2; the Ta depth profile was flat at about 50 at.% Ta in Cu to a depth of about 1000 Å.