A helicon plasma source has been designed using annular permanent magnets to produce the required DC magnetic field (B-field). With the discharge tube located in the remote field, rather than the internal field of the magnet rings, the plasma can be injected into a processing chamber containing the substrate to be treated. The discharge tube, radiofrequency (RF) antenna and magnet size were optimized by computation and tested by experiment. A distributed source comprising eight individual discharges was constructed and tested. Such sources are capable of producing downstream densities >1012 cm−3 (in argon) over an arbitrarily large area for high-flux applications.