This will have a positive impact on the PVD equipment market. Wafer fab capacity is being expanded in China, South Korea, and Japan due to growth in the 3D NAND and DRAM markets. “Some of the application areas of PVD include cutting tools, the storage industry, and microelectronics, where products are coated with thin metallic layers in order to increase their life spans. This increases the demand for PVD equipment,” says Asif Gani, a lead analyst at Technavio for semiconductor equipment.

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Photo by Nick Ares

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Why this yellow PVD coating?

Titanium nitride (TiN) coating is relatively wear resistant, inert and reduces friction. Consequently this yellow PVD coating is used predominantly on cutting tools, punches, dies and injection mold components to improve tool life.
TiN coating is easily stripped from tool steels. Therefore TiN is also often used for applications that use expensive tooling such as injection molding and forming.

You can purchase TiN coated drill bit sets through our shop.

There are several widely used coatings that use TiN combined with other elements to improve its properties such as titanium carbon nitride (TiCN), titanium aluminium nitride (TiAlN or AlTiN), and titanium aluminium carbon nitride. These coatings offer similar or superior friction, hardness, and oxidation resistance and come in a variety of colours ranging from light grey to near black, to a dark iridescent bluish-purple. These different coatings are becoming common on watches, knives and handguns, where they are used for both cosmetic and functional reasons.

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MELCHIOR – your new MB&F Friend – Baselworld 2015 from MB&F on Vimeo.

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Hybrid processing technology will enhance reliability and decrease costs and toxic emissions. Reactive magnetron sputtering (RMS) is being combined with either high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) or a cluster gun. The PVD Technology focuses on a range of nano-composite thin film coatings with a thickness less than two microns.

The development of this technology could reduce the cost and increase the durability of coloured PVD coatings for a variety of everyday products.

For more information take a look at

www.inform.pt/nano4color/

Photo by gabrielfam (Pixabay)

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Browse the full Physical Vapor Deposition Report at http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/physical-vapor-deposition.html

The global PVD market is expected to witness rapid growth in the next few years due to growth in end-use industries such as microelectronics and medical equipment. Microelectronics is used in different applications such as computers, medical and defense. These applications require high precision and efficiency. Rising demand for technological advancements has led to increase in the microelectronics market, and thereby the PVD market. However, patent protected PVD technology may act as a barrier for the entry of new entrants and increase initial investment cost in the market. Solar applications have immense potential in the PVD market due to limited exploration in the segment.

Global PVD market is bifurcated into three key industry segments such as PVD equipment, PVD materials and PVD services. The three segments are estimated to grow significantly in the next few years due to operational benefits of PVD technology over other surface coating methods. PVD equipment was the largest segment with 65% of market share in 2012. PVD services is projected to be the fastest growing segment, expanding at a CAGR of 9.7% from 2013 to 2019.

Browse Press Release of Physical Vapor Deposition Market @ http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/physical-vapor-deposition-market.htm

Major application segments for PVD equipment include microelectronics, storage, solar applications, cutting tools and others such as industrial, optics and packaging. Microelectronics was the major application segment with more than 45% of total revenue generated by the PVD equipment market in 2012. With rising demand for precision technology, demand graph for microelectronics is anticipated to rise in the next few years. The medical equipment segment is expected to be the fastest growing application, expanding at a CAGR of 10.2% from 2013 to 2019. Storage devices used in netbooks, laptops and computers, among others, occupied a significant share in the global PVD equipment market.
With the presence of a large number of end-use companies, Asia Pacific accounted for more than 50% of the global PVD market in 2012. A large number of PVD service providers are emerging in the region due to a significant increase in demand for PVD and attractive profit margins. Developed regions such as North America and Europe have significant number of PVD equipment and service providers. However, demand for PVD is low in these regions as compared to Asia Pacific due to the presence of a less number of end-use companies. Rest of the World including Latin America, the Middle East and Africa is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.7% during the forecast period.

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MarketsandMarkets, a global market research and consulting company based in the U.S. has published a strategically analyzed market research report on the ceramic coatings market.

Dallas – The report, “Ceramic Coatings Market by Technology (Thermal Spray, PVD, CVD, Others), by Type (Oxide, Carbide, Nitride – Coatings) and by Application (Transportation & Automotive, Energy, Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare) – Global Trends & Forecast to 2019”, defines and segments the global ceramic coatings market with an analysis and forecast for technology, types, and applications by volume as well as value.

North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific dominated the ceramic coatings market in 2013 and accounted for over 90% of the market. Country-wise, U.S. is the top most consumer of ceramic coating globally and is also its largest market for growing at a CAGR of 6.63% in terms of value till 2019. On the other hand, the rest of the world including Middle East, Africa, and South America is expected to witness the fastest growth rate by 2019. High performance ceramic coatings are widely preferred now by many manufacturers and include aerospace, automotive, healthcare, energy, defense, automotive, fiber-optic communications, and environmental protection sectors.

While thermal spray takes topmost positions in the ceramic coatings market with more than 64% share by value; the fastest growth is coming from nitride coatings used in numerous industrial applications which will continue to expand in the coming years. Oxide coatings dominate the ceramic coating market by type in terms of volume and value.

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Incorporating a completely new control system based on Siemens PLC with integrated safety and utilising a customer designed touch screen LabVIEW user interface for ease of operation.

Standard equipment includes Turbomolecular pump, DC/Pulsed DC sputtering, integrated magnetron handling and RF compatible chamber and shielding

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You are watching the sputtering of CoFe and Permalloy on a 3 inch Si wafer. The first faint plasma is the CoFe sputtering. When the CoFe gun shuts off the screen goes dark and the Permalloy gun is turned on. The plasma from the Permalloy deposition follows the path of the magnetic field.

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In magnetron sputtering with a suitable magnetic field configuration it is also possible to control the microstructure, chemical and phase composition of the growing film. Besides balanced discharges, two types of unbalancements are possible: type I and type II.
In type I, the plasma that is not strongly confined on the target, does not interact with the substrate. This magnetic assessment is specially used for sputtering multi-compositional films containing low melting point elements. In type II the plasma is confined both on the target and in a secondary confinement that bombards the growing film with a flux of ions extracted from the plasma. In such latter case, the ion bombardment has an effect of “plasma washing” of the film in the mean time it grows. Impurities weakly bounded to the film are knocked out from the impinging ions. That results into a strong increase of purity of the films in the substrate regions touched by plasma, while all the rest has higher impurity content. In the magnetron source we built, it is possible to pass from the balanced to unbalanced regime, just changing the magnetic core, without breaking vacuum.

The drawback of magnetically unbalanced configurations is that the plasma cone flushin the substrate has very narrow dimensions.
We have developed an electrostatic imbuto that opens the cone of plasma extending the unbalancement effect to larger dimension substrates.
www.surfacetreatments.it

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Origin of the term Physical Vapour Deposition, PVD
The term physical vapour deposition, PVD seems to have been originally termed by the authors CF Powell, JH Oxley and JM Blocher Jr. in their 1966 book “Vapor deposition”. However PVD processes were invented much earlier.

The development of vacuum technology, electricity and magnetism and gaseous chemistry
The history of PVD is closely associated with the development of vacuum technology, the discovery of electricity and magnetism and the understanding of gaseous chemistry.

Vacuum technology, glow discharges and sputtering
The first piston type vacuum pump was invented by Otto van Guericke to pump water out of mines as far back as 1640 . However the first person to use a vacuum pump to be able to form a glow discharge (plasma) in a “vacuum tube” was M. Faraday in 1838 who used brass electrodes and a vacuum of approximately 2 Torr. In 1852 W.R. Grove was the first to study what became known as “sputtering” although others had observed the effect while studying glow discharges. Grove used a tip of wire as the coating source and sputtered a deposit onto a highly polished silver surface held close to the wire at a pressure of about 0.5 Torr. He noted a coating on the silver surface when it was made the anode and the wire the cathode of an electrical circuit. In 1858 Prof A.W. Wright of Yale University published a paper in the American Journal of Science and Arts on the use of an “electrical deposition apparatus” that he used to create mirrors. This form of deposition may have been arc evaporation based rather than sputtering as the US Patent Office quoted his work when challenging T. Edison’s patent application for vacuum coating equipment to deposit coatings on his wax cylinder phonographs before subsequent electroplating. Edison successfully argued that his invention was a continuous arc whereas Wright’s process was pulsed arc. Edison could therefore be said to be the first person to make commercial use of sputtering.

Electricity and magnetism
In the late 1930s Penning developed an “electron trap” to confine electrons near a surface using a combination of electric and magnetic fields. This combination of electric and magnetic fields increased the ionization of the plasma near the surface and was named a “Penning Discharge” after it’s inventor. Penning used his invention to sputter from the inside of a cylinder. This was an important development in the history of sputtering and is a basic magnetron.

Lower pressures, lower voltages and higher deposition rates
Such a combination of electric and magnetic fields allowed sputtering to be performed at lower pressures and lower voltages, and at higher deposition rates than were previously possible with DC sputtering without magnets. Variations of the Penning magnetron have subsequently been developed, notably the post cathode magnetron invented by Penfold and Thornton in the 1970s and Mattox, Cuthrell, Peeples and Dreike in the late 1980s.

RF sputtering
The use of radio frequency, RF to sputter material was investigated in the 1960’s. Davidse and Maiseel used RF sputtering to produce dielectric films from a dielectric target in 1966. In 1968 Hohenstein co-sputtered glass using RF and metals (Al, Cu, Ni) with DC, to form cermet resistor films. RF sputter deposition is not used extensively for commercial PVD for several reasons. The major reasons are it is not economic to use large RF power supplies due to their high cost and the fact that you introduce high temperatures, due to the high self-bias voltage associated with RF power, into insulating materials.

Bias sputtering and triode sputtering
In 1962 Wehner patented the process of deliberate concurrent bombardment “before and during” sputter deposition using a “bias sputter deposition” arrangement and mercury ions to improve the epitaxial growth of silicon films on germanium substrates. Later this process became known as bias sputtering. The triode sputtering configuration uses an auxiliary plasma generated near the sputtering cathode by a thermoelectron emitting electrode and a magnetically confined plasma. This configuration was used to increase the level of ionization in the plasma but became obsolete with the development of magnetron sputtering.

“Closed loop” magnetrons
The effects of magnetic fields on the trajectories of electrons had been realized even before Penning’s work and studies continued after Penning published his work. The early Penning discharges used magnetic fields that were parallel to the sputtering target surface. Magnetron sources that use magnetic fields that emerge and reenter a surface in a “closed loop” pattern can be used to confine electrons near the surface in a closed pattern (“racetrack”). These confined electrons generate a high density plasma near the surface and were used in developing the “surface magnetron” sputtering configurations of the 1960s and 1970s.

The “S-gun” and planar magnetrons
In 1968 Clarke developed a sputtering source using a magnetic tunnel on the inside of a cylindrical surface. This source became known as the “sputter gun” or “S-gun”. Various magnetron configurations, including the planar magnetron, were patented by Corbani. Chapin also developed a planar magnetron source in 1974 and is credited with being the inventor of the planar magnetron sputtering source. Major advantages of these magnetron sputtering sources were that they could provide a long-lived, high-rate, large-area, low-temperature vapourization source that was capable of operating at lower gas pressure and offered higher sputtering rates than non-magnetic sputtering sources. With these superior characteristics magnetron sputtering became the most wide-spread PVD coating technique.

Reactive sputtering
The term reactive sputtering was introduced by Veszi in 1953. Reactive sputter deposition of tantalum nitride for thin film resistors was an early application. However it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that reactively sputter-deposited hard coatings on tools began to be developed and they became commercially available in the early 1980s.

Unbalanced magnetron and “closed field” magnetron arrangement
One of the disadvantages of these early magnetron sources was that the plasma was effectively trapped near the surface of the sputtering target. This meant that the reactive gases could not be dissociated effectively near the substrate and the ion bombardment of the substrate was low resulting in poor quality films. The problem was partially solved by adding auxiliary ionization sources or using RF. The invention of the unbalanced magnetron by Windows and Savvides in 1986 offered a better solution. The unbalanced magnetron allows some electrons to escape from the confining E x B field and create plasma in regions away from the target surface. When the escaping magnetic field is linked to other unbalanced magnetron sources (north to south poles), the plasma generation area can be significantly increased.

Coating structure and morphology
With the invention of the scanning electron microscope, SEM in 1965 the growth morphology of the deposited coating could be examined. In 1977 Thornton published a “structure zone model” (SZM) patterned after the Movchin and Demichin diagram for evaporated coatings. This diagram is known as the “Thornton Diagram” and illustrates the relationship between the coating morphology, the deposition temperature and the pressure in the sputtering chamber. Of course the sputtering pressure determines the flux and energy of the reflected high energy neutrals from the sputtering cathode, so the diagram reflects the degree that the depositing material is bombarded by energetic particles during deposition. In 1984 Messier, Giri, and Roy further refined the structure zone model.

Extensive range of applications
The number of applications has increased rapidly from the mid 1970s. To read about the applications of PVD coatings click the link. The information presented here is based on “The Foundations of Vacuum Coating Technology” by D. Mattox, which can be viewed in pdf format here www.svc.org/H/HISTORYA.PDF.

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