PVD Systems for advanced thin film research and production

Polyteknik PVD systems are installed in research institutes, pilot lines, and production environments, supporting demanding thin film applications where performance, repeatability, and scalability are critical.

What is thermal evaporation?

Thermal evaporation is a physical vapour deposition (PVD) technique in which a solid material is heated in a vacuum chamber until it vaporises.

The resulting vapour travels through the vacuum and condenses on a cooler substrate surface, building up a thin film layer by layer. Because the material travels predominantly in a line-of-sight path from the source to the substrate, the process offers precise control over film thickness and is particularly well suited to applications requiring clean, high-purity films.

Thermal evaporation is one of the simplest and most established PVD techniques and remains widely used in both research and industrial applications. Different source configurations, including resistive heating and electron-beam evaporation, allow a broad range of materials and deposition requirements to be accommodated.

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Working principle

In a thermal evaporation system, a crucible or resistively heated boat holds the target material inside a high-vacuum chamber.

As the source is heated, the material begins to vaporise, producing a directed vapour flux. The low pressure environment allows the vapour to travel from the source to the substrate with minimal scattering.

The vapour then condenses on the cooler substrate surface, typically positioned above the source, forming a thin film. Because the material travels predominantly in a line-of-sight path, the souce geometry and substrate positioning play an important role in determining film thickness and uniformity.

This straightforward working principle makes thermal evaporation a versatile and well-established deposition technique for a wide range of materials and applications.

Lift-off patterning and evaporation coating applications

The directional nature of thermal evaporation makes it particularly well suited to lift-off patterning. In a lift-off process, a patterned resist layer is applied to the substrate before deposition. Because thermally evaporated material travels predominantly in straight lines from the source, relatively little material is deposited on the resist sidewalls.

After deposition, the resist is removed, lifting off the unwanted material and leaving the desired metal pattern on the substrate. This enables clean pattern definition, precise feature formation, and excellent control of thin metal layers, without requiring a separate etching step. Thermal evaporation is therefore particularly well suited to lift-off metallisation, fine-feature patterning, prototyping, and research applications, where directional deposition and precise control of deposited material are important.

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