Cost of Ownership Analysis for a High Productivity Thin Film PVD System
October 23, 2014 12:00 am
A comprehensive understanding of total cost of ownership (CoO) is essential in today’s high volume, high technology, low cost manufacturing environment. Costs per part for individual process steps have to be accurately understood to the level of fractions of cents per process step to allow production lines to remain competitive and profitable. Numerous high technology components and products are produced using physical vapor deposition (PVD) of thin film layers to enable and enhance key performance properties. Hard disks, semiconductor devices, touch panel displays, solar cells, along with other emerging products fall into this high volume manufacturing, (thousands of parts per hour) category. This paper will review state-of-the-art solutions for lowest cost of ownership in PVD thin film processing today. Considerations in the overall CoO calculation will be discussed, including the impact of the PVD system design, system productivity (throughput, system uptime and price), target material quality, target type (planar or cylindrical), and source design (static, scanning or rotary). Other relevant factors such as utility costs and manufacturing region have to be thoroughly examined to calculate the true overall CoO.