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The Kurt J. Lesker Company, has expanded the capabilities of its Pittsburgh thin film applications laboratory with the addition of a model KDF 603 pilot production thin film deposition system, from its newly acquired subsidiary, KDF Technologies. The addition of the KDF thin film deposition tool will enable our Pittsburgh-based experts to perform coating trials for new prospects while optimizing the 603 system with the addition of features including plasma emission monitoring – critical to reactive sputtering.

The United States is engaged in a colossal effort to reshoring critical semiconductor manufacturing technology in order to better insulate domestic demand from international supply chain instabilities. This will create thousands of new jobs, requiring a substantial expansion of the US workforce skilled in vacuum science and its application.

JEFFERSON HILLS, PA, August 4, 2023 - Kurt J. Lesker Company (KJLC) has been granted a pivotal patent by the United States Patent Office. The patent, identified under US 11,631,571B2 dated April 18, 2023, focuses on the application of Ultra-High Purity (UHP) conditions to Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) and Plasma-Enhanced ALD (PEALD) systems, offering significant advancements in atomic scale processing research and applications.

The Kurt J. Lesker Company's Process Equipment Division (PED) in EMEIA has been delivering Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) equipment to customers in the region for more than 25 years, and we take great pride in supporting our customers with the remarkable research they do. Our ability to innovate is crucial to providing solutions to our thin film customers.

The Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin (ISFH), Germany, recently added a Kurt J. Lesker Company NANO 36 evaporation tool to their Perovskite PV research lab. The glovebox integrated deposition system is equipped with two thermal evaporation sources for the deposition of electrical contacts and a corresponding adhesive layer.

A new PVD 200 e-beam and thermal deposition system was installed by us in the newly launched micro-and nano-fabrication facility at Nazarbayev University. Among other projects, the research group is working on the fabrication of various field-effect transistors (FETs), microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) and other devices. The PVD 200 system will be used for metal lift-off processes and is equipped with an electron beam source and two thermal sources along with a load lock for fast processing. We're looking forward to hearing more about this project in the future!

We are proud to have supported our customer RhySearch in Switzerland with equipment for their Ion Beam Sputtering of 2D Materials project.For this project, we supported RhySearch with the design and manufacturing of the complete vacuum system. The core of the project is the UHV vacuum chamber, which was manufactured and delivered by the Kurt J. Lesker Company. We also supplied most of the relevant equipment around the vacuum chamber, including motion manipulation parts, vacuum pumps, gauges, feedthroughs and valves.

The Kurt J Lesker Company has been providing Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) systems to support photovoltaics (PV) research for more than 20 years and continues to support scientists globally to advance this critical renewable energy application. Solar cells work by using materials that absorb photons from sunlight in a broad spectral range and in turn effectively convert this captured light into free charges that produce electricity. Modern commercial solar cells are mainly based on crystalline Silicon, which is a cheap and abundant semiconductor^[1]. In recent decades, alternative thin film technologies based on materials combinations including Copper indium gallium diselenide (Cu(In,Ga)Se₂ or CIGS), Cadmium Telluride (CdTe), amorphous silicon and organic photovoltaics (OPV) have emerged with high efficiencies coupled with good cell stability, low manufacturing costs and come with the advantage of being a thin film, being both lightweight and flexible^[2].

Organic electronics research has advanced rapidly over the past few decades, with organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) now being commonly available in commercial devices such as mobile phones and TVs. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs, or organic solar cells) have potential to follow OLEDs as a commercially viable technology, but a number of challenges still need to be overcome. A recent publication from an international collaboration, with lead authors Prof. Moritz Riede (University of Oxford) and Dr. Ivan Ramirez (Heliatek GmbH), has investigated the degradation pathways of OPV devices using a common organic material, C₆₀, generating understanding which may prove critical to achieve long-term device stability. The complete solar cell structures used in the study were produced using a Kurt J. Lesker SPECTROS evaporation system.

Systems evacuated with oil-based pumps may be victims of backstreaming of pump oil vapors into the fore- line, vacuum chamber, and upstream throughout the system. The back- streaming referred to here is the act of pump oil vapors moving against the flow of molecules traveling from the vacuum chamber to the pump(s). In this case, we refer to these oil vapors as moving upstream, and eventually into the vacuum chamber. At high pressures, where the number of molecules from the chamber outnumber pump oil vapor molecules emanating from the pumping system, flow upstream is greatly mitigated. Oil vapor back- streaming is significantly more pronounced at lower operating pressures.