company history 

Vacuum Coating

There followed a multitude of development projects related to industrial large-area coating, such as the electron beam based high-rate vacuum coating of steel strip with aluminum for the packaging industry (1966), a series of batch type facilities for the production of high-quality capacitor foil for the electronics industry (1969), or the first vacuum coating plant with inner storage for the production of heat insulating flat glass for architectural glazings (1972).

If vapor coating in its different varieties dominated the first projects concerned with large-area coating, the triumphant progress of the sputter technologies began in 1974 using the new key component “annular slot magnetron”. Sputtering has specific technological advantages, such as stoichiometric exactitude, long-term stability and homogeneity of coating. It has gradually come to dominate vacuum coating technology.

The predecessor of the annular slot magnetron was the development of an ion getter pump of analog build for the production of low-oxygen ultravacuums in 1963, which already possessed all the significant functional elements of the later magnetron.  However, its potential for large-area coating was only recognized 10 years later.

The Chicken and Egg Principle

Normally, an effective industrial technology can only be worked out at manufacturing plants. On the other hand, the “obligatory” technology has to be developed for the requirements of the manufacturing plants. This leads to the practical application and transference to a plant which is essential for research purposes, thus ensuring that procedures at the highest industrial specific level can be developed further through experience gained during production.

In 1970, a new stage was reached at the institute. A whole cycle of technological research, asset development and transition to production was planned for every project. Only projects which could be transferred to industry were worked on. The scientific results alone did not count – the material and personal conditions had to be given for industrial usage. The expected progressive demand for new technologies and products were supposed also to correspond to the operating expenses. Staff at the institute worked in the production plants for months – they gained experience which they subsequently employed in developing their subject. Partnerships with industries were established. They would remain customers up to the 1980s.

This strategic mode of operation, geared to social realities, ensured the stable economic success of the institute right up to the events leading to German reunification in 1990.

Coating of Large Areas

By using the results of basic research ordered by the state and by industry, the institute played an important part in contributing to the fact that in the late 1970s East German companies achieved an internationally recognized leading position in the areas of electron beam and plasma technologies and their use in vacuum coating especially.

Several times the institute broke new ground in the coating of large areas and the development of highly productive and at the same time more eco-friendly production processes and systems. Special focus lay on the requisite key components in primary research and also in technological development.

The basis for many of the developments of the Research Institute lies in the realization that energy conservation is one of the central questions of the century. “One of the most important new sources of energy will be energy saving”, as it says in a publication by the institute, and “New technologies and production which make saving of energy possible will be given priority”.

Another important milestone was the creation of the first in-line sputter equipment in 1983 for continuous coating of precious metal-free mirrors for the furniture industry. It depended on the use of large-area planar  magnetrons, and was the predecessor of major equipment engineering and construction for the production of heat-insulating architectural glass today using the physical foundations of sputter technology.

However, due to the revolution of 1989/1990, this field was entered in only in the 1990s and first limited to delivering single components and upgrades for existing machines.