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 Part 3 of this blog series, we discussed designing deposition systems with linear substrate motion or continuous web coating. As promised, this blog will show the results of modeling of the plate coating example we defined previously.

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.