KAMIS offers high quality sputtering targets, evaporation materials, crucible liners and other metals to help you meet the needs of your organization. For over two decades, KAMIS has been a trusted partner to the semiconductor industry, top research faculties and universities around the world.

Artists and craftsmen more than 2,000 years ago developed thin-film coating technology unrivaled even by today’s standards for producing DVDs, solar cells, electronic devices and other products. Understanding these sophisticated metal-plating techniques from ancient times, described in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research, could help preserve priceless artistic and other treasures from the past.

Gabriel Maria Ingo and colleagues point out that scientists have made good progress in understanding the chemistry of many ancient artistic and other artifacts — crucial to preserve them for future generations. Big gaps in knowledge remained, however, about how gilders in the Dark Ages and other periods applied such lustrous, impressively uniform films of gold or silver to intricate objects. Ingo’s team set out to apply the newest analytical techniques to uncover the ancients’ artistic secrets.

They discovered that gold- and silversmiths 2,000 years ago developed a variety of techniques, including using mercury like a glue to apply thin films of metals to statues and other objects. Sometimes, the technology was used to apply real gold and silver. It also was used fraudulently, to make cheap metal statues that look like solid gold or silver. The scientists say that their findings confirm “the high level of competence reached by the artists and craftsmen of these ancient periods who produced objects of an artistic quality that could not be bettered in ancient times and has not yet been reached in modern ones.” Read More

Sputtering is one of the most popular technologies for deposition of thin films. Although sputtering was first developed about 200 years ago, since World War II it has become increasingly important for the creation of innovative devices, becoming fundamental in sustaining the growing demand for semiconductor circuits and other electronic devices.

Sputtering targets have found increasing penetration not only in electronics, but also in sectors such as mechanical/chemical, energy, optical coating, and life science, among others.

Although for decades sputtering was primarily used in microelectronics for fabrication of semiconductor devices, in recent years, as the semiconductor industry transitions to new processes that allow for the fabrication of thin films below 20 nm, sputtering has found alternative sources of demand in other industry segments such as flat panel displays and solar cell manufacturing.

In fact, over time the availability of sputtering materials has expanded to meet the requirements of the most varied applications within the electronics, mechanical/chemical, energy, optical coatings, life science, and food packaging sectors. Read More

The vacuum process of thin film deposition involves the application of coatings of pure materials over the surface of varied and differing objects. The thickness of coatings or films typically possess a range of microns and angstroms and can be of single material or a layered structure of multiple materials. Using quartz crystal monitoring, there are basic principles used to control the thickness and rate of thin film deposition.

The key class of deposition methods is evaporation which involes heating a solid material within a high vacuum chamber in which vapor pressure is produced. A relatively low vapor pressure is adequate to raise a vapor cloud within the vacuum chamber, which is then condensed over surfaces as a coating or film.

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Via Azom.com

Sputtering process is used in a variety of applications such as flat panel displays, optical discs, automotive and architectural glass, web coating, hard coatings, optical communications, solar cells, semiconductors, magnetic data storage devices, electron microscopy, and decorative applications.

Typical materials used in these applications are Copper, Chromium, Chromium-Molybdenum, Aluminium, Titanium, Aluminium-Titanium, Tungsten, Nickel, Silicon, Indium and Silver, amongst others.

Sputtering process can be used for depositing thin films from a wide range of materials on to different substrates. Although process parameters make sputtering a complex process, they allow a greater degree of control over the film’s growth and structure.

Sputtered Neutral Mass Spectrometry is perfect for analyzing thin metal films where composition, thickness and interface condition can be determined. The example presented here, shows a magnetic film stack comprising Cr, Ni, Cu and Fe. Of the different methods of data storage, magnetic hard discs still offer highly economic means for high density rapid access. The continual move towards more and more compact read/write heads and more closely spaced data tracks has lead to a considerable development of magnetic materials and structures for this demanding application. Analysis of the metallic layer structures used in magnetic data storage is vital for both development and quality management with secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and sputtered neutral mass spectrometry (SNMS) offering information on minor and major element composition respectively.

SIMS and SNMS

Both SIMS and SNMS use a concentrated, mono- energetic, chemically pure ion beam of typically 1-10 keV to sputter erode the surface under study. A small fraction of the sputtered material gets ionized due to the sputtering process itself and in SIMS, it is these ions that offer the sensitive information for which the technique is known. Being a mass spectrometry technique, all elements and isotopes may be detected, and in favorable conditions the detection limit can be in the low ppb region. However, because the ionization mechanism for SIMS takes place at the sample surface, it is very much dependent on the local chemistry and the ionized fraction can vary by several orders of magnitude. This makes SIMS ideal for trace analysis in materials of known matrix but quantification in materials of changing matrix can be complicated. SNMS overcomes the “matrix effect” by separating the sputtering and ionization events.