Alternate soft and hard multilayer system with superhardness,high strength-toughness,high wear-resisting,self-lubrication,can greatly improve the durability and adaptability of the metal cutting tool in the modern processing.Al/TiN nanoscale multilayers were designed.A set of nanoscale multilayers with different TiN layer thickness varied from 1.1 to 8.4 nm were deposited on Si(100)substrates at room temperature using filtered cahodic arc plasma(FCAP)and DC magnetron technologies.The results indicate that the coatings have fine multilayered structure,Al layers have an amorphous structure or a nanocrystalline structure in all multilayer,and the crystallinequality of TiN layers is improved with the increasing of the TiN layer thickness.The hardness of the multilayers is higher than that calculated by rule-of-mixtures.Although the multilayers possess higher friction coefficient,it has better toughness.