How Does an Electron Beam Evaporator System Works?

Electron Beam Evaporator System

Electron beam evaporation is a type of physical vapor deposition in which the target material is used as a coating and bombarded with an electron beam from a charged tungsten filament to evaporate and convert it to a gaseous state for deposition on the material to be coated. The electron beam causes atoms from the target material to transform into the gaseous phase.

The materials to be applied with thermal evaporation techniques can be pure atomic elements or can be molecules like oxides and nitrides. The object to be coated is referred to as the substrate and can be in any wide variety of things like in semiconductor wafers, solar cells, optical components or in other possibilities.

Difficulties of direct evaporation to form oxides, nitrides, fluorides, carbides are due to fragmentation of vaporized compounds that can overcome many of these problems. Here metals are evaporated in the presence of reactive gas with a typical reactive evaporation system. The problem here is that most oxides are substoichiometric due to the low energy of the evaporated adatoms due to which deposition rate can suffer.

Evaporation is one of the first processes used extensively for the deposition of thin films and in the process enabled to use of thin films in a wide variety of applications that lowered manufacturing costs and expanded the functionality of bulk materials. Evaporation and related processes are still used extensively to synthesize a wide variety of thin coating.

E beam evaporation is used to deposit a wide variety of materials used for optical thin film applications as laser optics and solar panels to eyeglasses and architectural glass to provide the optical, electrical and mechanical qualities required. It provides high material utilization efficiency as compared to other processes and reduces costs.

Some evaporation systems are delivered with programmable sweep controllers to provide optimal heating of the evaporation materials and minimized contamination from a crucible. Multi-pocket e beam sources can be provided to sequentially evaporate different evaporation materials without breaking vacuum for multilayer film designs. Some systems are configured in a way that is controlled for automated single and multilayer process control.

E – Evaporation the system is controllable, repeatable and compatible with the use of an ion source to enhance the desired thin film offering a better configuration for R and D production, targeting high volume with certain types of applications.

Electron beam evaporator system is better than resistive thermal evaporation which is better than heating materials to much better temperatures which is better for resistive or crucible heater. This allows for very high deposition rates and evaporation of high-temperature materials that can better maintain the purity of the source material. Water cooling also tightly confine the electron beam heating to only the area occupied by the source material, eliminating any unwanted contamination from neighboring components.

E beam evaporation is also available on a number of PVD platforms and in many applications including metallization, dielectric coating, optical coatings, and Josephson junctions