We’re continuing our series of customer spotlight blogs that highlight the work our customers do and their unique thin film applications. In this post, we’re showcasing the thin film deposition work of Dr. Adrienne Stiff-Roberts, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Stiff-Roberts and graduate students Spencer Ferguson and Tomas Barraza use a commercial Resonant IR Matrix Assisted Puled Laser Deposition (RIR-MAPLE) system from PVD Products in their work at Duke, which focuses primarily on thin film deposition of organic and hybrid materials. We spoke with the three of them to learn more about the strides they are making in Resonant IR Matrix Assisted Pulsed Laser Evaporation.

Advanced deposition research and production come with unique needs, and when faced with the limitations of commercial deposition systems, it often seems most straightforward to do it yourself (DIY). Building a custom deposition system can be its own learning experience, but unless building deposition systems is a direct component of your research or production, your resources would generally be better spent buying a custom-made product from specialists.

To showcase the work our customers do and their experience with our thin film deposition systems, we’re continuing our series of blogs that highlight our customers and their unique thin film applications. We continue the series with Dr. Gin Jose.

In September, we announced our exclusive licensing agreement with The Ohio State University to commercialize a patent-pending deposition technique developed by faculty member Dr. Fengyan Yang. The innovative technology is based on off-axis sputtering and Dr. Yang's research group has demonstrated how the new process can be used to grow a broad variety of epitaxial films that have a crystalline quality that rivals more expensive processes, such as molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and pulsed laser deposition (PLD). The new capabilities developed at the university will meet the growing demand in physics, chemistry, and material science for entirely new classes of materials in both academic and industrial research and development.

At PVD Products, we work with each of our customers to ensure that they get a custom-made deposition system that meets their individual needs while conforming to their budget and schedule requirements. We are highlighting how some of our customers use our products in unique and creative ways. We kick things off with an interview of D. Bruce Buchholz.

PVD Products, Inc. is proud to announce our entrance into an exclusive licensing agreement with The Ohio State University for thin film deposition technology developed in the University’s Department of Physics. Through this agreement, PVD will commercialize patent-pending Ohio State technology for deposition of high quality thin films via sputtering.

In Part 1 of our deposition rate and uniformity series, we discussed the key considerations for deposition tool performance. The second part of our series takes a look at the steps for deposition system design based on rate and uniformity.

What are the key parameters of interest to anyone selecting a tool for thin film deposition? They are, of course, the film properties themselves. Concerning the process of growing the film, the most fundamental are the deposition rate and film thickness uniformity. The rate is important to reach proper film thickness in single or multi-layers, and to achieve stoichiometry in co-deposited films. The rate also correlates to how economically viable the system will be via the throughput: how long it will take to create the layer needed to serve a particular purpose. The uniformity determines how much of the film area will hold to these metrics over the entire area of the substrate, to within a desired tolerance.

Thin film deposition systems are famously long-lived. With proper maintenance, instruments can last for decades! That said, with the ever-advancing march of technology, most systems eventually fall short of demands for higher throughput or improved yield. When that occurs, the deposition system will generally require a major overhaul in order to accommodate new modes of automation and advanced computer controls. When upgrades are not possible or feasible, it may be time to replace the entire system. The primary concern during such a change is maintaining consistency of performance between the old and new systems. It is imperative that films produced from the new deposition tool match that of the previous tool.

Talk about a field that is exploding with innovation potential! Two members of the PVD Products team recently had the chance to attend a workshop at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on accelerated discovery for energy materials.