High intensity glow discharge technology such as high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) has been proven to produce highly ionized metallic deposition particles. The charged ions have nice energy controllability, inducing a large density as well as good uniformity and mechanical properties to the coatings. However, the high impulse discharge is unstable and leads to a significant decrease in deposition rate. In this work, we perform the simulation of high-intensity discharge in C-HPMS and HiPIMS and find that the power density of C-HPMS is much lower than the peak power of HiPIMS to obtained a similar high ionization rate, but the deposition rate of C-HPMS is dozens of times compared to HiPIMS. By this, we developed a new cathode which can bear ultra-high power density for C-HPMS by optimizing the thermal and magnetic distributions. By C-HPMS, the deposition rate of Cu is found to above 2μm/min and the crystal structure is controllable easily. In reactive sputtering of Al, a greatly expand deposition window is obtained and many non-stoichiometric meso-phases can be fabricated with a very high deposition rate. At the same time, owing to the higher metal ionization rate, many hard coatings, such as CrN, TiC, TiAlN, etc., which have a smooth surface and high-density, as well as the similar mechanical performance to the arc ion plating samples, can be obtained by C-HPMS
