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As a Product Manager in the Materials Division, I field a lot of questions from customers from many different industries with varying degrees of sputtering experience. One of the more common emails that I receive goes something along the lines of, "There's something wrong with my bonding because the indium has melted out of the sides of my target." Often times the user has waited for their target, spent money on it, only to use it one time and had to stop due to the melted bond. A frustrating situation for sure.

Dr. Nicholas A. Strnad (General Technical Services, LLC) in collaboration with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Command Army Research Laboratory and the University of Maryland, College Park have recently developed conformal processes for a variety of lead-based electronic materials with outstanding properties using atomic layer deposition (ALD)...

Sputtering is a relatively mature approach for the deposition of a variety of thin film materials. Initial publications on the process date to the early 1800s. In its simplest form sputtering provides a route to manufacture high quality reflective coatings for mirrors and potato chip bags; and at the extreme end, for creating the most advanced semiconductor computing devices in the world.

The current push to commercialize space travel has resulted in renewed demand to launch objects and even people into earth orbit or event deep space. Companies including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have demonstrated the ability to make certain portions of a launch vehicle reusable and that may dramatically alter the cost to get to space. True rocket ship factories are emerging which, in one case, can put out a couple of full blown launch vehicles every month!

The Kurt J. Lesker Company^® (KJLC^®), a global manufacturer of vacuum systems, thin film deposition tools and vacuum components, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued US patent number 9,695,510, 'Atomic Layer Deposition Apparatus and Process', covering the design of an atomic layer deposition system and the process to use that system to deposit highly precise and conformal thin films. This proprietary technology substantially reduces the interaction of various precursor gas molecules with the internal surfaces of the reaction chamber and enables actual focusing of gas streams to more effectively coat the surface of arbitrarily large substrates.

On 6 November 2017 our Jason Hrebik and J.R. Gaines delivered presentations at the 70th annual conference on Gaseous Electronics (GEC2017), held at the Doubletree Hotel, Green Tree, PA. Hrebik displayed his expertise through a presentation on the capabilities and benefits of the High Power Impulse Sputtering (HiPIMs) process and provided the audience with an introduction to the new KJLC Impulse™ power supply. The conference featured a group of presentations from industrial companies, including LAM Research, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron. Gaines capped off the afternoon session with a review of the practical issues associated with the integration and application of plasmas in Plasma-Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition (PEALD).

In a July 2017 publication, Drs. André Anders and Yuchen Yang provide an enhanced description of the flows and energy of electrons at the face of a magnetron sputter cathode. By combining a unique imaging process and a linear cathode (target) the researchers were able to generate a series of time/space images which shows plasma instabilities driven by the motion of electrons, within the cathode's magnetic field. The images show the effects on plasma flow for both conventional DC magnetron sputtering (dcMS) and also high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMs). The full paper is available on line at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994192.

Next generation vacuum deposition systems must evolve in order to keep pace with the ongoing evolution of thin film materials and devices. Researchers seeking to pursue new areas, such as biomedical devices, 2D materials, specialized magnetics and oxide-based films need new tools to support their work. The frontiers of materials science, particularly at the intersection of biology and thin film deposition, have brought new materials into the vacuum space that were never intended to be there.

ALD has been described as a thin film deposition technology that can keep the semiconductor industry on track per Moore's law (or observation) [1] for a few more years. In its most ideal form, it is a process that enables monolayer, or sub-monolayer growth of certain materials through the sequential exposure of a functionalized substrate to a pair of precursor gases. If dosed correctly the gases attach at specific surface sites and react to create a near perfect film on the order of a few angstroms thick. Presently the U.S. Department of Defense anticipates that the last process node for semiconductor devices (the end of Moore's) is 7 nm and will be achieved by 2020 [2].

Combinatorial Magnetron Sputtering (CMS) has distinguished itself as a viable tool for the rapid development of vast libraries of complex materials. Researchers at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) and the Kurt J. Lesker Company^® (KJLC^®) [1] have recently published work on Combinatorial Magnetron Sputtering (CMS) using a novel robotically controlled thin film deposition cathode tilt and substrate manipulation mechanism. Combinations of metal alloys, mixed metal oxides and nitrides have been demonstrated with the system as a basis for a predictive model developed by Cal Tech to streamline the design of new materials for certain critical applications.