Takuya Sugawara, Ryota Saito, Yoshinori Ogo, Mitsuhiro Miyauchi, Shincron Co., Ltd., Yokohama, Kanagawa. Japan
Large-area coating technologies are increasingly demanded for industrial applications requiring high productivity, coating uniformity, and process flexibility. Radical Assisted Sputtering (RAS) has been widely used to achieve high deposition rates and uniform dielectric multilayer coatings. However, conventional cylinder-type drum loading and unloading mechanisms limit adaptability for low-particle, short takt time, high-volume production.
In this presentation, we introduce a newly developed RAS-based sputtering system, RAS-2200. A rotary carousel-type substrate handling concept combined with a revolver-style transport mechanism enables short takt time production with improved process stability. Particle generation suppression is addressed through detailed system-level design and process concepts.
The carousel drum is composed of strip-shaped facets assembled into a cylindrical structure, and the number of facets can be freely configured. By adjusting the segmentation of these strip facets, the size and geometry of substrates mounted on the carousel can be flexibly adapted, enabling versatile process configurations for various large-area substrates. The platform supports hard coatings as well as complex functional multilayer coatings by inheriting the excellent features of RAS.
Overall, the RAS-2200 large-area sputtering system offers a versatile solution for high-volume manufacturing of hard and complex coatings on diverse large substrates, combining high productivity, process flexibility, stable coating performance, and reduced particle generation.