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Sputter Coating Glass with Silver

Hi, I am undertaking a pHD at the University of Melbourne. As part of my research I want to sputter coat glass slides with silver to use as a working electrode. I am familiar with the gold coating process where a layer of chromium is first deposited to achieve strong binding. I'm not sure if this is necessary with silver. Furthermore, I am unsure what current is required for a Ag deposition thickness of approximately 40nm?

Ann Gooding
University of Melbourne - Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2005

I was just wondering whether you will be doing this sputtering under vacuum, and what gas you will be using. I work as a process control technician for a company that does glass sputtering. We do it under vacuum with direct current. We use pure argon. If these are similar to your conditions I can give you some numbers that might help.

Cory Anderson
- Lucerne Valley, California, USA
2006

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Hi,

I'm an MS Student at Cornell University. I am also looking to do a design project for which we want to sputter thin silver films under vacuum with pure Argon gas. Could you help me out with your data as well ? I'm looking for sputter rates, required bias,type of sputtering ( I'm assuming DC Magnetron ), throughput and pros and cons, and rough (order of magnitude) costs as well as any trends you may have noticed.

We are trying to compare it with CVD to get the best method, but we would like to make some quantitative as opposed to qualitative comparisons. Could you please help me out with your data ?

Thanks a lot !

Arjun

Arjun Shivanand Kannan
- Ithaca, New York, USA
October 26, 2011

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October 31, 2011

It appears you want to out source your project work!
Dc sputtering of silver is pretty easy. Literature survey would give you sputtering yields. The rest, I am afraid, you have to work out yourself.

H.R. Prabhakara - Consultant
Bangalore Plasmatek - Bangalore Karnataka India

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November 9, 2011

If I was trying to coat glass with silver the easiest way I would just do vacuum /evaporation. For added adhesion you might try etching with HF acid just before coating -unless it has to be optically smooth.

I suppose sputtering would have the advantage of being able to clean and etch the glass with glow discharge before sputtering.

But you can't beat evaporation for simple.

Tim

Tim Bandy
- Orlando, Florida, USA