Design of 10 kW, 400 kHz AC Power Supply for Ferrite Inductively Coupled Plasma

This article describes the design and implementation of a 10 kW, 400 kHz ac power supply for a ferrite inductively coupled plasma (ICP) reactor. The developed power supply is composed of an ac inverter and a front-end converter not only to offer stable dc input voltage for the inverter but also to respond to the dynamic load characteristic of the plasma reactor. A brief introduction of a series-parallel resonant converter (SPRC) with a trapezoidal approximation and determining a design point considering a wide load range are described. In the case of the inverter, a low-loaded quality factor design method based on the analysis of a series-parallel resonant inverter (SPRI) to obtain high efficiency is proposed. With respect to the plasma ignition, a control logic without an additional plasma ignition circuit is proposed. Finally, the performance of the developed power supply is demonstrated under various experimental conditions including an experiment with a ferrite ICP load.