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This paper discusses the impact of pre-activation of oxygen in the reactive sputter deposition of Al2O3. The paper describes experiments in which oxygen, activated by an independent plasma source, was introduced into an aluminum, sputtering chamber as an alternative to conventional reactive sputtering techniques employing the injection of ground-state molecular O2. The papers covers:

• The technique of generating activated oxygen using an inductively-coupled plasma (ICP) source
• Characteristics of deposition behavior with and without the activation of the reactive species to assess the impact of the active oxygen as an enhancement
• The effect of pre-activation of reactive oxygen on target condition and target voltage hysteresis
• Optical and physical properties of films deposited with and without the assistance of pre-activation showing the impact of this technique

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