STARTER SOURCES
Customized Evaporation Solutions
Materion is supporting a trend towards replacing traditional evaporation slugs with solid custom-designed starter sources. These starter sources offer our customers several unique advantages over evaporation slugs. They provide customers with a competitive cost model that lowers cost of ownership by increasing yields and minimizing downtime.
Creating Starter Source Designs
Materion is a leading supplier of evaporation materials including slugs, pellets, disks, random pieces, crucible liners, and starter sources. Working closely with OEMs and end use customers, Materion has developed innovative evaporation products to reduce spitting, increase yields, and facilitate preferred film properties and rates of deposition.
To develop customized starter source designs, Materion engineers work closely with customers in a rapid development environment. We have manufactured over 80 starter charge designs in over 24 unique compositions and alloys. Critical dimensions for design include outer diameter, thickness, angle, inner diameter, radius, and any other pocket, step or custom-machining. Typical compositions include Ni, Ti, Al, Cr, Cu, and other custom alloys. Materion’s current production volume is thousands of starter sources per year.
Yield Improvements from Starter Sources
Materion starter sources enable users to maximize yields and decrease downtime. Customers report significantly lower spitting rate from starter sources. Example: Ni starter sources decreased yield drop from 2% to 0.5% when replacing Ni slugs. Customers have acknowledge these yield improvements lower their costs and are a compelling reason to switch from slugs to starter sources.
Increased Throughput
Materion starter sources enable quicker machine uptime, as they eliminate the need to pump down and perform a melt formation run to the slugs. Starter sources simply require a quick surface burn in, and are then ready for use. Our starter source designs can also eliminate the need for crucible liners, an additional cost savings to the customer.
Stable Process
Using a starter source provides customers with a more stable process. With starter source designs, the inconsistent surface area of slugs is eliminated. This provides a clean single point of contact for the beam to sweep. This translates into a more consistent use of power that will require less adjustment to reach optimal coating rates. The result is a uniform evaporation process.
Other Benefits
With Materion’s evaporation materials expertise and many years of starter source design experience, 
we can provide:
- quick turn around on customized starter source designs
- improved yields and uptime
- competitive qualification pricing
- volume discounts for continued production support
If you are ready to reap the benefits of a switch to starter sources, Materion is ready to support your transition. We partner with our customers for innovative solutions to their evaporation needs. For more information on starter sources, please contact John Kuphal, PVD Product Specialist,
at John.Kuphal@Materion.com.