Patrick Morse, Intevac, Santa Clara, CA
The market for large area abrasion resistant anti-reflective coatings has been growing as human machine interfaces have been transitioning from physical buttons to screens. To maximize the operating lifetime of screens and reduce the added power that they consume, wear resistant and anti-reflective coatings on screens have become the preferred OEM solution over the addition of user applied screen protectors. Small area applications like cell phone camera lenses are currently applied using batch systems. Inline systems could produce extremely high volumes of such coatings on large area substrates but are considered cost prohibitive to many of the suppliers of these coatings in terms of CapEx and cost of ownership. Low-cost batch systems used for the existing small area coatings suffer from low throughput and relatively low yield which prevents manufacturers from expanding operation to the larger area substrates. The TRIO Platform designed by Intevac Inc. takes advantage of mathematical process optimizations that removes large area market barriers by providing the throughput advantages of inline systems at a significantly lower Capex, CoO, and facility floor space requirements.