Cost Effective Deposition System for Nitrogen Incorporated Diamond-like Carbon Coatings

Nitrogen incorporated diamond-like carbon (N-DLC) thin films were grown, at high base pressure of 5 x 10-3?Torr, under varied nitrogen gas pressure (NGP) (variation from 55 to 85?mTorr) and varied negative self-bias (NSB) (variation from 35 to 190?V), using primary pump (rotary pump) processed radio frequency-plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition technique. These films then studied for their structural compositional and nanomechanical properties. Time of flight-secondary ion mass spectroscopy was used to confirm the presence of nitrogen and to investigate the depth profile of these N-DLC films, whereas energy dispersive X-ray analysis measurement was carried to analyze the atomic concentration of constituents of film. Micro-Raman analysis reveals change in D and G peak positions and ID/IG ratio with the change in NSB as well as NGP. It is worth noting that N-DLC film grown at NGP and NSB of 55?mTorr and 100?V, respectively, exhibited very high hardness as 40.3?GPa. Hence, due to better nanomechanical properties by simpler, high deposition rate and cost effective process, which yielded very high throughput may leads these N-DLC films to their wide industrial applications such as hard and protective coating on cutting tools, automobile parts, bio-implants or wear resistant coating on magnetic hard disk.