I have a UHV magnetron sputter system that had an issue with the mass controller gate. I had to send the gate for repairs, so the system has been open for a while. So, in order to achieve high vacuum, it will likely need a bake-out to reduce the contaminants after the gate is reattached. I was hoping to get some advice as to the process I should use, and anything I should keep an eye out for.
The backing/conditioning goal is to remove the process variation due to chamber/plasma change.
The conditioning changes from process to process, so there is no general recipe.
In general, the goal is to coat the chamber again, meaning running depo steps a few time. Since uniformity is not an issue, one can increase any parameter that increases depo rate.
Also, might be a good idea to use the standard recipe given from the vendor.
Also, this is a good opportunity to clean the entire chamber, since it will be coated anyway.
Good luck.
For baking, set the highest possible temperature in the substrate heater during the pumping process and wait for the lowest possible vacuum. Do this process after cleaning your chamber. It will take time, and before starting heating, assure that the chamber is not leaking (vacuum leaks) and is properly sealed.
After this process, you can take the deposition of Ti/Zr metal for coating inside the wall of the chamber.
As rightly mentioned by others here, cleaning of the vacuum chamber is very important after it has been left open. We usually wrap heating tapes around the cleaned sputter system and proceed with baking. You can see the attached pic. All adsorbed contaminants can be removed; an improvement in level of vacuum is seen and further pump down time to ultimate vacuum is drastically reduced.
Hi,
I fully agree with mentioned above remarks.
Based on my experience I can add:
Clean it, close it, start pumping, check if there is no leak, if not and the pressure is better than ~5*10E-6 mbar start to bake out. Be sure what component in your vacuum chamber is most sensitive for temperature and set the maximum temperature (including small safe limit). Protect viewports and feedthroughs (alu foil). If you have, use heating tent or heating jacket etc.
Just one comment for the picture, try not to cross heating tapes. In our case, these places are most possible to burning out tapes completely.
Good luck
Thank you Tomasz Grzela for the useful suggestion regarding crossing of heating tapes! Surely it seems like a pitfall to be avoided, although it is a bit difficult to wrap a spherical chamber without crossing the tapes. Fortunately we use a load lock system to manipulate change of substrates, so the main chamber is protected from exposure. But the latter is unavoidable during sputter target changes. Anyway, we shall try to adjust the tapes. Thanks and regards!
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