Hind High Vacuum Co. Pvt Ltd (HHV), a vacuum science and technology company with major clients like HAL, ISRO, BARC, Titan etc, announced the launch of its indigenously developed compact table-top vacuum coater for nanotechnology research. These compact table-top vacuum coating machines, the BT 150 and BT 300, using PLCs from B&R Industrial Automation, an Austria based company, were developed entirely by HHV’s thin film technology division out of its Bengaluru facility to provide electron microscopists and researchers, especially in nanotechnology, an ideal compact machine for thin film coating of specimens for microscopic analysis.

HHV BT150 and BT300 are designed for ease of use and feature a full-colour, menu-driven, touch-screen control system for fully-automatic control. The control system can store up to 30 different process recipes for easy recall and can output process data to a separate device for storage.

“The development of materials and technologies in nanotechnology research cannot be conceived without microscopic analysis (SEM/TEM) of specimens. To enable microscopic analysis the specimen has to be first coated using thin film deposition technology to withstand vacuum conditions and high energy electron beam,” said Prasanth Sakhamuri, Managing Director of HHV.

The machine can run in automatic as well as manual mode. The specimen to be coated is placed on a rotating platform, which is controlled by a stepper motor, inside a closed chamber. The rotating platform enables a uniform coating on the substrate. Thin film coating begins with creating an environment conducive for coating and follows a 4 step process – vacuuming, pre-processing, processing and venting. A vacuum pump generates vacuum inside the chamber, which removes the gases inside the chamber. The pre-process consists of preparing the sources for the deposition. The thin films can be deposited either by resistive evaporation or by magnetron sputtering routes.

The user can define the thickness and the number of layers needed for coating. Usually the thickness is measured in Angstroms and the BT 150/BT 300 machines are capable of coating up to 6 layers using the sources loaded. A frequency based input is used to measure the actual coating thickness and is provided as a feedback to the control system. The coating stops after the desired thickness is achieved. BT 150 and BT 300 fits perfectly in a laboratory, which makes it the ideal tool for a lot of routine deposition processes.