6. Conclusion

The development of deposition processes enabling fine control of thin-film properties is of the utmost importance. For example, high-power pulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) enables the sputtered metal atoms to be highly ionized. However, control of the energy of the ions reaching the substrate is usually achieved by applying a substrate bias.

This approach makes sense, but is also difficult to industrialize, especially when considering electrically insulating substrates. This is why the bipolar HiPIMS regime, in which a positive voltage pulse is applied to the target after the high-power negative voltage pulse, has been developed recently and has led to several advances.

In this article, we've covered a number of important aspects. We have presented :

• two electronic circuit topologies suitable...