PVD Blog

Custom Thin Film Deposition Systems: 7 Reasons to BUY Instead of DIY

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.
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Customer Application Spotlight: Thin Film Deposition Advancements at the University of Leeds

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.
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Service After the Sale: Extending the Life and Function of Your Custom Deposition System

At PVD, installing a custom deposition system at a customer’s facility signals the beginning—rather than the end—of that customer relationship. We’ve been known to return months and even decades later to upgrade or service a tool, expanding the utility of our thin film deposition systems.
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System Control Software: Developing Your Custom Deposition Program

A customized deposition system can help you achieve the best results with maximum efficiency. For example, a well-designed combinatorial deposition system can execute a program to produce a wide range of slightly different film compositions, each deposited within discrete test pads on a single substrate. This makes it possible to explore an enormous range of material combinations and structures within a single wafer run. Effective combinatorial deposition experiments require precise control over several deposition parameters, such as selection from multiple magnetrons and types of power supplies, target-to-substrate distance, mass flows from multiple MFCs, pressure, test pad exposure time, and exact substrate position. With full control of all parameters, practically any desired recipe can be executed within each test pad.
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Case Study: Increasing Vacuum Coating Capacity for a Leading Optical Component Manufacturer

In Spring 2015, PVD started working with a customer who specialized in providing and manufacturing subsystems, process controls, and instruments for markets using thin film technology. In their search for a new vendor who could build a vacuum coater to their detailed specifications, the customer solicited ten companies. Out of those ten companies, PVD was selected for the project. Recently, we spoke with the customer about the process of working with PVD. They told us:
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Six Factors that Affect the Cost of a Thin Film Deposition System

Our customers use our custom thin film deposition coating tools for a wide range of applications from thin film lithium Ion batteries to combinatorial materials development, high temperature superconductors, semiconductor, optical, and tribological materials, etc. Although we divide our coating technologies into four categories—sputtering, evaporation, pulsed laser deposition (PLD), and chemical vapor deposition (CVD)—the range of features and combinations that we offer create an unlimited number of possible coating system configurations. The complex interconnection and dependencies among features make it impossible to determine a system's cost from a general description. That said, at a very simplistic level, there are six factors that have a high impact on the cost of a deposition tool. In no specific order, these are:
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Four Tips to Reduce the Cost of Your Custom R&D Deposition System

At a fundamental level, the specifications for a specific thin-film coating will drive the overall requirements for a vacuum deposition system. Wise choices early in the concept phase will reduce the overall cost of a coating system without sacrificing the throughput or film quality.
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The Right Tool for Every Job: Custom Design for R&D

By researchers, for researchers There’s nothing that fuels our team’s passion more than building a custom R&D system. Our extensive background in thin film coating allows us to fundamentally understand and support the deposition process for specific R&D applications in a way that standard capital equipment manufacturers cannot.
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Six Reasons to Have Your Custom-Designed Vacuum Deposition System Professionally Built

When your research needs are not met by catalog options, a first impulse might be to build your own custom-made vacuum deposition system. When you “Do It Yourself (DIY)” you get exactly what you want, right? Not necessarily.
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