State of the art in large area vacuum coatings on glass

There is no doubt that the business and technology of large area vacuum coatings on glass for architectural, automotive and display applications has made significant progress in the last two decades and is still proceeding with great expectations for the future. Important recent progress in production technologies are: (1) integrated in-line sputter production technologies, (2) key process technologies such as dual pulsed magnetron sputtering, the high power pulse module, the new model C-mag, low voltage sputtering, and high density plasma assisted deposition, and (3) material technologies. However, there is one drawback in the vacuum process. This is the large initial investment cost. If market demand is high enough to enable full coater capacity, the coating business is normally profitable. The difficulty is to maintain a balance between the capacity and the market demands. Improvement of productivity by retrofit technology to adapt capacity to market demands is one way to overcome this difficulty. Taking into consideration the strong pressure to further reduce costs, then, there must be an effort to reduce equipment costs, otherwise the users might shift to alternative technologies. (C) 1999 published by Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.