without a need for flooding the chamber with atmospheric air and then having to re evacuate it these locks are commonly employed by commercially available apparatus for loading vacuum chambers a typical load arrangement of the wafers 21 on the pallet 23 is shown in fig2 once the pallet 23 has been loaded into the lock the lock is evacuated and the pallet is transferred from the lock to the anode 19 the anode 19 is vertically movable to facilitate this transfer after having been transferred to the anode 19 the pallet 23 and the wafers 21 located on the pallet become electrically part of the anode 19 after loading the wafers 21 into the apparatus 11 a low pressure gaseous ion source is introduced through an inlet port 26 shown in the base 13 a preferred ion source is argon gas which is typically used in the chamber 14 at an absolute pressure of 10 2 torr the argon is ionized by an electron flow from the target 18 to the anode 19 in addition to the field potential an alternating potential at radio frequencies may be superimposed onto the existing field potential in the described embodiment a 3kw power supply 28 working at a frequency of 13 56 megahertz is preferred the polarity of the power supply 28 in fig1 is applicable to a typical process for depositing a film of material on the wafers 21 as described hereinafter it should be realized however that by reversing the polarity of the potential on the power supply 28 the process can be reversed in that the target 18 becomes the anode 19 and the wafers 21 on the pallet 23 become part of the cathode the resulting reverse sputtering process is then also referred.