Diamondlike carbon (DLC) coatings with high hardness and wear resistance are widely used in a variety of industries – mechanical engineering, transportation, medicine, microelectronics, etc. The development of new methods for obtaining such coatings is an important and urgent task. The paper describes a new method of deposition of carbon coatings, which is a combination of the process of magnetron sputtering by highpower bipolar pulses and pulsed vacuum arc evaporation. As a result of the formation of a high power magnetron discharge pulse on the surface of a graphite target, an electric arc with a duration of ~ 5 µs and a current amplitude of ~ 1400 A is initiated. A positive voltage is then applied to the target. The proposed combination allows the generation of highly concentrated fluxes of accelerated ions to bombard the growing coating. The paper presents the results of measurements of the electrical parameters of the discharge and the study of the structure of the obtained carbon coatings by Raman spectroscopy. Carbon coatings obtained in the bipolar combined sputtering mode are characterised by a higher content of sp3-carbon compared to coatings obtained in the combined mode without positive pulses and in the medium frequency pulsed magnetron sputtering mode.
