NCD

Usually, most of people want to make their costly articles and valuable electric devices more unique and more outstanding. In order to meet these requirements, ALD technology could provide goods with higher quality and more functions like anti-tarnishing, anti-wear and anti-biotic effects as well as more conspicuous colors by thin film interference phenomena. NCD, a next generation technology leader of solar cell, display and semiconductor manufacturing systems, demonstrated several precise color coatings on various samples with multi laminating metal oxide thin films prepared by atomic layer deposition.

The Essential Macleod software was used to estimate various color coating results, and most full visible range of colors could be obtained by controlling thicknesses of metal oxides with their light interferences and reflections. The various structures of five nano-laminated thin films of Al2O3 and TiO2 were designed in advance and the evaluated colors corresponded well with the simulated color spectrum results.

The parts of a watch band that were coated at a low growth temperature of 100°C using Lucida series ALD, show different, bright, warm, metallic and mirror-like colors of purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red, that are presenting nearly full rainbow colors. The back cover of a smart phone deposited by ALD shows the decorative red color with incident angles at 0° and gold one with incident angle at 90°. Also the colors are changed with various view angles, because the relative thicknesses of the layers are varied with the incident angles of light and then the light waves traveling through the thicknesses characterize their own colors matching the wave lengths.

ALD technology is a great method to provide various functions like anti-tarnishing, anti-wear and anti-bacterial effects as well as tailed decorative coatings on very complicated figures like 3D objects at low temperatures and the dominant film quality without particles and pinholes and also the application of ALD decorative coating has huge markets such as automotive, electronics, jewelry, medical device, sporting goods, watch and other advanced coating products. Even though there are these many advantages and potentials of ALD decorative coatings, ALD technology has not been well industrialized until now because of its low productivity and high product cost. However, NCD has developed the highest throughput and the largest-area ALD technology such as Lucida GS and GD Series ALD, so enables to easily provide remarkable ALD systems for economic decorative mass production coatings for customers who want to make their products to be outstanding and different.

Link #1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy5-7W8nqWw&list=LLJqsrQArnF7iEpU9vMF1w8g
Link #2 : http://www.blog.baldengineering.com/2016/12/ncd-enables-ald-decorative-coatings.html