PVD Methods for Manufacturing All-Solid-State Thin-Film Lithium-Ion Batteries

The third chapter is devoted to the description of the PVD methods used for the SSLIB’s functional layers deposition and manufacturing of the battery as an integrated device. At the beginning of the chapter, the limitations imposed by the use of solid electrolyte and PVD methods on the capacitive characteristics of SSLIB were considered and requirements formulated for functional layers that partially compensate for these limitations. The main part of the chapter describes those PVD methods that are most convenient and effective in the formation of the SSLIB structure. These include vacuum thermal evaporation methods, which are sufficiently simple to implement and have a high vapor deposition rate. Since many compounds decompose on thermal evaporation before the melting point is reached, these methods are mainly used for metal coatings deposition. In the SSLIBs’ production, thermal evaporation is applied for formation of current collectors and lithium electrodes. More universal is the method of vacuum magnetron sputtering, which is used for depositing electrodes. Although the deposition rate by this method is significantly lower than during thermal evaporation, this is compensated by the higher quality of the resulting films, which is especially important in the manufacture of nanocomposite electrodes and solid electrolyte. The main advantage of magnetron deposition is its versatility, which allows the deposition of functional layers in a rarefied gas atmosphere by sputtering two or more targets, both conductive and dielectric. The chapter describes in detail the designs of thermal evaporation and magnetron sputtering devices of direct and alternating current, supplemented by examples of SSLIB functional layers deposited by magnetron sputtering.