Your top picture of the target and its ring, show the purple colour depsosits.

Well it looks like you have backscattered deposit towards your target, while sputtering, and a thin film is deposited in the areas all around the target, which is have that purple or blackish colour, partly due to carbon contamination.

Firstly, Do not touch this target rings, or area around the target electrodes etc., with bare hands, while mounting your targets. Use gloves.

Secondly, the backscattered deposition onto the target clamping raings increases when you sputter at higher pressures, probably lowering the sputtering pressure would minimize the problems.

Thirdly, it is always good to clean your target clamping rings etc., (by sand blasting, or using an abrasive scrub) periodically, and keep them clean and shining.

Finally I find your shield plate over the targets with circular holes are also unclean, and getting coated with back scattered deposition, keep them also clean will be beneficial.

I used to take simple soap water, and use a stainless steel wire scrub, and wash them thoroughly in hot water, and thorough rinse them many times to remove all the soap residue, and dry them thoroughly in an oven, before re-fixing or mounting them into the sputtering chamber.

Maybe we are sputtering at high pressure, as soon as we put Argon gas into the furnace, the pressure does not decrease but increases higher than 9.0x10-1pa so we tried to reduce it to 6.0x10-2pa by reducing the gas flow Agron but the traffic is not enough to cover the color

Hello Raymon Ics.

For your question about different colors of titanium nitride coating. Titanium nitrides have range of stoichiometric compositions ranging from Ti10N6 to TiN. For example, TiN2 is dark yellow and Ti2N3 is dark brown red. Apparently next one will be already purple, which is what you see. Zirconium has only three nitrides, and formation energy of these nitrides is much more discrete, respectively. But color of Zr nitrides is very similar, especially if cathode is prepared from a TiZr alloy.

On question of Ar and N2 gas mixture you use, answer yourself the question, why do you use gas mixture? After all, in process of TiN synthesis, you only need N2 nitrogen. In case of magnetron sputtering, Ar is necessary. But you are using ARC evaporators (Hall accelerators, use cathode spots, like in your picture), so why do you need Ar in gas mixture?

I hope my answer was helpful to your.

Konstantin Pavlov (Konsta)

Thank! We use magnetron sputtering method, with 20 spray sources, Agron gas is introduced to clean the porcelain surface, flow 400sccm for 2 minutes, then put N2 gas in for 5 minutes with a flow rate of 1200sccm to create gold coating. ;

Agron gas regulator pressure :6.0x10^-1 pa

N2 gas regulator pressure: 2.5x10^-1 pa

With such pressure, a purple coloration occurred at the TiN . Cathode