Materion Microelectronics & Services, a Materion Corporation business, Cleveland, Ohio, has opened a Materials Applications Laboratory in Westford, Mass. It will serve three functions: produce coatings for customer evaluations of PVD materials, promote customer education/collaboration, and support Materion internal R&D. The laboratory features thin film equipment, such as a sputtering system with a 150-mm diameter target, and an electron beam box coater. It also contains a wide range of thin film characterization equipment, including a KLA-Tencor Surfscan 6420, which measures the surface topology (particles) on deposited films.
Previously, evaluation of coatings deposited by Materion’s evaporation or sputtering materials was performed by the customer, but now, under certain circumstances, Materion can provide test coatings. Evaluation of coatings becomes especially important if the initial price of the PVD target or slug is high, as in the case of precious metals. If the material of interest is in stock at Materion, customers can purchase test coatings to check if a higher-cost PVD material will work for their application prior to having to purchase a target.
“The launch of the Applications Laboratory will expand Materion’s collaboration with our customers,” says Richard Koba, Marketing Manager for the lab. “It will offer an avenue to address challenging technical issues, as well as provide opportunities for joint development of new physical vapor deposition (PVD) materials.”
Materion offers quick-turn development of new metal alloys for various technological applications across diverse markets, including: hard disk drive, silicon semiconductor, gallium arsenide (GaAs), radio frequency (RF), and light-emitting diode (LED). Our customers are able to evaluate thin films deposited from Materion’s broad catalog of metallic and ceramic PVD products, as well as new PVD materials.
