History and current status of commercial pulsed laser deposition equipment

This paper will review the history of the scale-up of the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process from small areas similar to 1 cm(2) up to 10 m(2) starting in about 1987. It also documents the history of commercialization of PLD as various companies become involved in selling fully integrated laser deposition tools starting in 1989. The paper will highlight the current state of the art of commercial PLD equipment for R&D that is available on the market today from mainstream vendors as well as production-oriented applications directed at piezo-electric materials for microelectromechanical systems and high-temperature superconductors for coated-conductor applications. The paper clearly demonstrates that considerable improvements have been made to scaling this unique physical vapour deposition process to useful substrate sizes, and that commercial deposition equipment is readily available from a variety of vendors to address a wide variety of technologically important thin-film applications.