Sputter Coater

The sputter coater (Cressington 108) is designed primarily for sputtering conducting gold layers on to samples to prevent charging effects in the scanning electron microscope. It uses a planer magnetron sputter target configuration to give efficient high rate sputtering with minimal speciman heating.

The Cressington 108 is designed as an integrated vacuum system with it's desktop pumping system matched to the coating unit for optimum performance. The quality of coatings produced by the system relies on the gas handling characteristics in the range 0.01mb to 0.1mb. The high pumping speed of the system in this pressure range naturally results in rapid pumpdown performance from atmosphere and short cycle times.

In the past, sputter coaters for SEM have used the gas pressure control valve to adjust the sputtering current. This model does not opperate in this way:- gas control and current control functions have been seperated. This allows the user to independently adjust operating pressure (mb) and sputter current (mA) to obtain the best sample conformity and minimum grain size.