Thin Film Consultancy

Using extensive practical experience and technical knowledge in providing solutions to thin film technology challenges for a range of companies spanning high-tech start-ups through to multinationals, a consultancy service is offered that includes:

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• Applying creative thinking to generate, develop, and implement inventive customer-tailored manufacturing solutions.

• Assessing existing and next generation product designs and manufacturing to identify improvement opportunities.

• Defining and scoping product development projects and programmes.

• Developing unique thin film materials and associated processing solutions.

• Directing research and development activity to achieve customer specified product objectives.

• Evaluating competitive technologies for emerging products.

• Identifying processing advancements and potentially competitive emerging technologies relevant to customer specified requirements.

 

Several examples of work:

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• Conceived a design [built and demonstrated] for a liquid exposure test system to enable deuterated water (D2O) uptake in organic and inorganic thin film coatings, with or without ac/dc electric field stressing, for evaluating the coating transport, deuterium uptake concentration and location as a function of time, temperature, electric field gradient, and solution concentration, measured with surface probe Nuclear Reaction Analysis for identifying operational stability and longevity of selected coatings for use as barriers to improve the reliability of immersed electronic devices.

• Devised and demonstrated a very high-speed method of selectively transferring devices from an array.

• Evaluated PVD versus PECVD deposition and the associated coating properties of thin oxide and nitride passivation coatings deposited at low temperatures [≤ 100 C], which included identifying application limitations for use in electronic devices aimed at temperature sensitive substrate materials such as piezoelectric ceramics and plastic films.

• Identified parameters of low energy ion irradiation that impact on low temperature PVD deposited complex oxide thin film coatings microstructure and properties for tailoring operational performance in semiconductor and photonic device applications.

• Implemented computational fluid dynamic modelling with experimental response surface design methods to limit the number of practical experiments required to investigate digital ink jet filling of containment wells for a display application.

• Provided a solution to a metal contact failure issue on a semiconductor device using nuclear probe analysis (RBS/ERDA/NRA) by identifying the role hydrogen was having on the interplane bonding strength and proposing a solution to it through a manufacturing process modification.

• Researched Aluminium – Silver metal bilayer intermetal diffusion and identified a practical interposed barrier coating solution that was implemented in an existing silicon device manufacturing process.