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For over half a decade, Denton Vacuum has developed deposition and etch technology that enable users to enhance and innovate their research techniques and manufacturing processes.
Discovering ground-breaking technology is not always a straightforward path. It takes a willingness to try, fail, and try again. At Denton, we take pride in our willingness to fail and foster a culture of learning from our failures.
In this video, Peter Denton, longtime CEO and now Chairman of the Board, tells the story of how a failed magnetron experiment led to a revolutionary discovery for Denton.
Video Transcript
Frank Cumbo: I think we’ve instituted a culture that is not afraid to fail. If you don’t try new things, you don’t fail, you’re not going to create new things.
Peter Denton: What was interesting back in those days in our R&D department, we were trying to make a more uniform magnetron sputtering cathode.
And everybody in the industry knows that magnetrons typically have a racetrack, and your material utilization is not what you would want it to be. And various solutions have been proposed and implemented.
But in those days, somebody said, “Why don’t we take the magnets that are behind the cathode, put them around the edge and we’ll get a different shape of plasma, and we’ll have a uniform magnetron, sputtered cathode.”
We thought it was a great idea.
It just didn’t work.
At the end of the day, it didn’t sputter anything of any significance, but one of the R&D physicists said, “Hey, wait a minute. We’ve got a lot of ions coming out of this device. So we’re not depositing material, but we’re creating ions.”
And it was what we called a cold cathode ion source, which we’ve sold many hundreds of over the years.
And it all came from the mistake, it was the attempt to make a sputter cathode. We ended up with an ion source. And it has worked out very, very well over the years.
Conclusion
To learn more about Denton’s cold cathode ion source, download our technical paper Ion Bombardment Characteristics During Growth of Optical Films Using a Cold Cathode Ion Source where we examine the energy and flux of impinging ions and how they performed in a vacuum system equipped with a broad beam cold cathode ion source.