Invention Reference Number
Description
Synthesis and processing of materials frequently requires heating, even on an industrial scale. Laser-based heaters alleviate the need for electrical feedthroughs, specialized heating elements, and incidental cooling, but current versions have drawbacks. For example, they typically handle single square cm-scale sized samples and often require a conventional computer with an operating system and proprietary control software to operate, making them difficult to integrate into existing infrastructure. The entire instrument itself can also be large. This device is a compact, research-scale version that illuminates a well-defined region of the material that is being processed with minimal incidental heating of supporting structures. It is immune to the deleterious effects of oxidizing atmospheres on components encountered in hot filament/element approaches, allows higher throughput serial processing of multiple samples before reloading, and integration into existing infrastructure is eased by supporting an agnostic approach to control.
Applications and Industries
- Semiconductor industry
- Vacuum tool industry
- Thin film coating and processing
- R&D facilities that do in-house synthesis and materials processing
- Deposition equipment sellers
Benefits
- Air-side components are non-proprietary and reconfigurable
- Sample turret allows higher throughput before breaking vacuum
- PID loop-controlled processing temperatures as low as 150°C
- Control at discretion of end user – i.e., manual and/or computer control with user-based custom software
- Only consumes 3U worth of instrument rack space
Contact
To learn more about this technology, email partnerships@ornl.gov or call 865-574-1051.
