Materion Microelectronics and Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Materion has announced that it has completed the capacity expansion of its facility located in Whitefield, New York by 50%. As part of the expansion, the company has installed a fully automatic robotic twin-wire arc spray, increased its capacity of precious metal refining, made use of new processes for cleaning and has also used a clean room, which has been certified to Class 10,000.
The facility enables cleaning of precision parts and provides surface treatment of physical vapour deposition shield kits to be used by manufacturers for applications such as photovoltaics, LEDs, medical consumables and precious metal refining.
The twin-wire arc spray is made to increase the lifetime of the shields that are used in highly sensitive processes by applying a coating under the surface layer of parts after they have been cleaned and the precious metals are extracted. This coating increases the roughness of the part’s surface and provides added adhesion inside the vacuum chamber. This in turn, allows more amount of material to be deposited with lesser amount of unwanted particles. After the completion of cleaning, the parts are thoroughly inspected to ensure maximum tolerance and full cleanliness. When manufacturers return the parts after usage, this under layer coating is removed for another cleaning process thus providing, faster turnaround time, increased shield effectiveness and lower cost of ownership for customers.
Source: http://www.materion.com