Plasma in everyday life:
1-plasma TV,
2-plasma coated jet turbine blades,
3-plasma manufactured LEDs in panel,
4-diamond like eyeglass coating,
5-plasma ion implanted artificial hip,
6-plasma laser cut cloth,
7-plasma HID headlamp,
8-plasma produced H2 in fuel cell,
9-plasma aided combustion,
10-plasma muffler,
11-plasma ozone water purification,
12-plasma deposited LCD screen,
13-plasma deposited silicon solar cells,
14-plasma processed microelectronics,
15-plasma sterilization in pharmaceutical production,
16-plasma treated polymers,
17-plasma treated textiles,
18-plasma treated heart stent,
19-plasma deposited diffusion barriers for containers,
20-plasma sputtered window glazing,
21-compact fluorescent plasma lamp.
Plasma processing
The role of plasma processes in today industry is sometime unfairly overlooked. Yet, plasmas are at the heart of extremely important and diversified markets, such as semiconductors (IC manufacturing), solar cells production, flat panels, functionalized surfaces, micromachining or space propulsion. This is due to the fact that plasmas allow various operations to be performed: thin films deposition, etching, surfaces modification...
As an illustration, examples of plasma processing implication in everyday life are given on the picture.
For industries, there is a constant need in increasing the plasma sources performances, essentially with regards to the two following aspects: the processes rates must be higher and the processed areas must be larger. The processes rates increase relies essentially on the ability of the plasma sources to generate high electron densities, and also hot electrons able to efficiently dissociate the processes precursors. For large area (typ. >1m2) processing, the main requirement is the uniformity of the processes all over the treated surface. Large area processing is particularly interesting. First it allows new products to be developed, such as very large flat panels or very large photovoltaic cells. But, even for wafer based processes, such as in semiconductor industries, large area processing is of prime interest as it will allow much larger amounts of pieces to be treated in a same time, thus increasing the production yield and reducing the costs.