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Why You Need to Focus on Continuous Improvement for Your Thin Film System

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When investing in thin film deposition equipment, you need to think beyond the short-term results you want to achieve and focus on long-term goals and improvements. Your vendor should have the same focus, as well as the engineering capability to deliver continuous improvement, so you gain reliability, functionality and added value in your system over time.

What’s Wrong With a Bucket of Parts?

With a bucket of parts approach, you are simply going to a system integrator and asking for hardware components based on the thin film properties you’d like to achieve. But there is no focus on your specific application and unique needs for your system. You may receive functional hardware, but in practice, your system might not deliver the best results.

Fundamentally, this approach cannot ensure that film specs will be met because it doesn’t put those specs at the forefront. With an application-specific design, though, you specify the thin film requirements first, and your system is then purposefully designed to meet those requirements.

An application-specific design does not just meet desired specs with the initial tool, however. When your next system is shipped to you, it will have the added benefit of engineering improvements and technical upgrades to ensure that it performs even better than before. But this can only be achieved with the right partner.

Industry-Leading Expertise and Reliability

Continuous improvement starts with a partner who has industry-leading knowledge of your thin film deposition technology. With this level of expertise and experience, they will be constantly refining their technology across the board, and they will be able to apply those same improvements directly to your thin film deposition systems.

Denton Vacuum, for example, is the leader in indium bump deposition technology. We are constantly learning from new applications and refining our equipment at a technical level to meet unique requirements. And we don’t just add new components – we also optimize by stripping out functionality that’s no longer needed, to make for a smoother process and cut down on unnecessary maintenance.

We do this in two different ways: we collect feedback directly from you, and we also collect feedback from other manufacturers using the same technology. We then integrate all of this into the next version of the system. Usually these improvements are also available as upgrades to your existing systems.

Benefits of Continuous Improvement

Focusing on improvement over time helps position your business for long-term success. As you go through transitional phases and priorities shift, you will be able to ensure that your thin film deposition process continues to meet key requirements for production.

You will also gain improved functionality and long-term reliability in your process performance, so you know you’re producing high-quality coatings that meet application-specific needs. Continuous improvements also provide more value to you over time. You will achieve a lower cost of ownership and a higher return on investment by optimizing your configuration.

Download our Integrity indium coating system brochure to learn more about Denton’s proprietary technology and how we can refine your configuration to improve process performance.