V-Grade 5S Pro for Budgeting and Production Planning
Assume that you are planning the production of a new thin-film material for an optoelectronic device, sputter deposition with rotational cylinder targets being the modality of choice.
First, you build a numerical model of your process with a Tin Model program in the V-Grade 5S series. With the model, you may first want to find out if the thin-film uniformity meets the specification. Tin Model programs can help you make modifications to the process, which may involve one or more techniques, so that specifications are met. Now you can proceed with the following for budgeting and planning:
- With V-Grade 5S Pro you will know what deposition rate you can obtain for the material under the power allowed for the magnetrons. With this knowledge, you can determine the throughput of your process.
- For a given quantity of the product, you can now determine the total manufacturing time required of the thin-film production line, and thus the number of shifts you must organize.
- One of the standard output items of the V-Grade 5S series is the absolute thickness, which is the thickness of the coating (in nanometer) for each gram of the source material vaporized. In this case, it tells you how many grams of the source material will be sputtered off the cylindrical targets, in total, for the manufactured quantity of the order.
- With the above, your target supplier can now tell you how many targets you will need in total. You can further know the frequency at which you will need to replace the targets. (Adjust the total manufacturing time if the downtime for replacing targets is significant.)
- For budgeting, these costs can now be easily calculated: direct labor, duration of production-line usage, raw material (the targets, in this case), and the total electrical energy consumed by the magnetron cathodes.
All the above can be carried out for an existing production line, or before a manufacturing plant is built.
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