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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Many optical coating applications require excellent uniformity in both the physical thickness and optical properties of the deposited films. As interest grows in sophisticated coatings on challenging substrate shapes, such as aspheres, high performance eyewear, beveled cell phone screens, camera lenses and a variety of other products, meeting these uniformity requirements becomes more difficult.

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The concept of energy storage in thin films has been around for a long time. One of the early uses of the term 'Thin Film Battery' (TFB) was in a 1976 patent by Exxon [1]. Nearly 20 years later, Bates and his team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) patented the sputter-based, all solid state battery utilizing the electrolyte LiPON [2]. The Bates battery paired LiCoO₂ and Li₃PO_4-xN_x (LiPON) to produce a 4 volt secondary cell.

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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].

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The Kurt J. Lesker Company® (KJLC®) is introducing a novel optical coating system incorporating the Isoflux Inverted Cylindrical Magnetron (ICM) with a unique substrate carrier configuration designed to provide features unavailable in any currently marketed coating system. The combination of the Isoflux ICM with the design of the KJLC precision optical coating system results in a deposition tool capable of providing high quality coatings with unprecedented flexibility of operation, all in a package with an unrivaled simplicity of design and operation.

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