PVD technology - cost effective, high quality and environment friendly surface treatment

Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) is a technology where a material is evaporated and condensed to form a thin film coating over an object (substrate). In general, coatings consist of metals or ceramics; usually nitrides, carbides and oxides. With this highly flexible method, thicknesses of the coatings can be varied from a few atomic layers up to approximately 10 µm.

With a wide range of coating materials and thicknesses, PVD can be custom made to applications and the coatings can be optimized for various characteristics, such as electrical, mechanical, optical and decorative.

In PVD, the substrate does not need to be metallic or electrical conductive, thus making it possible to coat non metallic isolators, plastic and ceramic objects. The possibility of maintaining low process temperatures, below 100ºC (212.00F), increases the number of applications even further.

At present, PVD is used industrially in a wide spectrum of industrial applications. The most common are semiconductors, CD/DVD-media, tools, mechanical components, automotive components, sensors, biomedical, optics, etc. The use of PVD is also increasing rapidly in other industries to replace less environment-friendly chemical and galvanic methods. In addition, Impact's technology can broaden the usage of PVD to even more applications.
 
Evaporation in PVD can be forced by several methods. The most commonly used method by Impact Coatings is magnetron sputtering, a method where the coating material is "blasted" from the target by a plasma.