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<h1><b>PVD - Thin film</b></h1>
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PVD and thin film -technology, an introduction
A cost effective, high qualitative and environment friendly surface treatment
PVD, Physical Vapour Deposition, is a technology where a material is evaporated and condensed to form a thin film coating
over an object (substrate). Coatings consists in general 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 approx.10 ”m.
With a wide range of coating materials and thicknesses, PVD can be tailor made to applications giving various characteristics
of the layer: electrical-, mechanical-, optical- and decorative surfaces etc.
Another advantage with PVD, is that the substrate (the material to be coated) does not need to be metallic or electrical conductive,
giving the possibility to coat non metallic isolators, plastic and ceramic objects. Also the possibility of maintaining
a low process temperature, below 100 șC (212,00F), increases the number of possible objects to be coated.
PVD is used today 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, but the use of
PVD is increasing rapidly in other industries to replace chemical and galvanic methods.
Evaporation in PVD can be forced by several methods. The most commonly method used by Impact Coatings is magnetron sputtering,
a method where the coating material is "blasted" by a plasma, from the target. Other PVD-methods suitable for Inline Coater
are arc-evaporation, effusion cells etc.
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