The concept of plasma-based physical vapor deposition (PVD) is today widely used for depositing thin films.PVD is a general term describing how films are deposited by the condensation of a vaporized form of a material onto any surface. The vapor of the thin film material is created by physical means from a solid deposition source.
One such PVD method is sputter deposition,which has proven to be a robust and upscalable coating method. The most commonly used tool for sputter deposition is magnetron sputtering,which essentially is a diode sputtering configuration where a magnet pack is placed behind the target (cathode) to better confine the plasma close to the sputtering region.