General Plasma works with our customers to develop state-of-the-art thin film processing solutions for large area coating markets such as thin film photovoltaics, architectural glass, web processing and other large area process applications. Our charter is to develop process solutions that utilize General Plasma’s innovations in large area plasma sources. By engaging our design engineers, process engineers and material scientists we leverage our laboratory to demonstrate solutions for our customers.

Our laboratory boasts two class 100 clean rooms, RCA wet cleaning station and three development thin film process tools. Our process tools include a 300 mm roll-to-roll web coater, in-line 300 mm coater, a 0.75 m x .40 m diameter drum coater and one ion beam source chamber 3 meters in length. The facility encompasses 4500 square feet of space.

The R&D laboratory is equipped with a fully permitted Silane, Disilane, Ammonia and Hydrogen gas bunker with continuous alarm monitoring networked through gas cabinets, valve manifold boxes and process tool controllers. A Vector 6000 hazardous gas scrubber treats the exhaust of process tool vacuum pumps. This combination of gases available to our process tools permits us to develop a range of PECVD thin film materials that can be evaluated by our customers. In addition to these sources, each chamber is equipped with organo-metallic precursor delivery systems that permit the deposition of a wide array of metal oxides and metal nitride thin film coatings.

Thin film characterization equipment includes a phase shift microscope, Hall mobility analyzer, four point probe, UV-VIS-IR spectrometer, taber abrader and optical microscope. In addition to these instruments, our materials scientists have access to FTIR, Raman Spectroscopy, SEM and XPS through our collaborative work with the University of Arizona’s Materials Science Laboratory.

In addition to these instruments a fully equipped machine shop is available to rapidly modify and create new setups as required for process development activities.