Automotive
SCI Engineered Materials has over 20 years of experience manufacturing target materials for the Automotive PVD Coating Industry. Over these years, we have developed target materials to drive our customer’s commercial success in multiple areas including Automotive Mirrors and Decorative Coatings (Interior Trim and Headlight Lamps).
Wheel Trim
Wheel Trim
Automotive wheel trim coatings need to provide a blend of endurance as well as ornamentation. A common material for wheel trim is Nickel-Chrome (NiCr) or Nichrome. With the right blend of nickel and chrome, these coatings can provide protection against environmental elements, while also adding to the visual appeal.
Headlight Reflectors
Headlight Reflectors
The main purpose of a headlight reflector is to bounce back as much light as possible toward the intended area. Light from a headlight bulb will propagate outwards, in all directions, and thus without a reflector a good portion of the light's ability to illuminate in front of the car is lost. Particular materials and their various formulations are much better at reflecting light than others. Silver is widely known as the most effective material at reflecting light, partly due to it having free electrons. Other materials with free electrons include gold, and copper, which are other good reflecting materials. However, the most widely used material is 6061-Grade Aluminum.
SCI has developed our own special blend of Automotive Grade Aluminum which has an even greater ability to reflect light than 6061-grade aluminum.
Sideview Mirrors
Exterior Mirrors
Side-View mirrors also utilize materials that provide a good reflective index. Although the process of coating a material to make it a mirror is called "silvering", typically 6061 Grade aluminum is used to create the reflective surface.
Touch Screens
Transparent Conductive Oxides
It's all in the name.
A material that is both optically transparent, and electrically conductive. There have been many different combinations of materials that provide these properties, but none has been as stable and widely adopted as Indium Tin Oxide or ITO.
At SCI, we have the privilege of seeing this material in its bulk form. In its sputtering-target form, ITO isn't transparent at all due to the density of the material. It's important at SCI that when we manufacture a sputtering target, it be as dense as possible so that our customers get as much use out of the target as possible. A high-density target material is even more important when the target needs to be conducive since there is a direct relationship between the density of a material and its electrical conductivity. Many large, commercial coating operations use systems that are DC (Direct Current) powered, which means that the sputtering target must be conducive for thin-film deposition to occur.
Smart Mirrors
Smart Mirrors
Gone are the days when mirrors just reflected. Advances in thin-film technology have enabled manufacturers to push the boundaries of common materials, making them smarter and the world safer for us. Smart mirrors not only provide visual coverage to areas that are outside of a person's typical visual range, but smart mirrors can project camera feeds directly onto the mirror's surface. This allows the driver to see not only what is in direct line-of-site of the mirror, but all of the other blind spots common automobiles have.
Decorative Trim
Decorative Trim
Decorative trim applications typically don't need to be high-purity since the molecular structure is less important in terms of how the coating will look. Typical trim materials include chrome, nickel, and aluminum. Products are typically manufactured in batches within large vacuum chambers to ensure a consistent appearance.
Electronic Components
MOSFETs
Metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors, or MOSFETs, are used in many different types of electronics. MOSFETs require almost no outside input to control the load current.
| Material | Planar Targets | Rotatable Targets |
|---|---|---|
| Aluminum (Al) | X | X |
| Chromium (Cr) | X | X |
| Alumina doped Zinc Oxide (AZO) | X | X |
| Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) | X | X |
| Titanium Dioxide (TiOx) | X | X |
| Niobium Pentoxide (Nb2O5) | X | |
| Ruthenium (Ru) | X | |
| Silver (Ag) | X | |
| Molybdenum (Mo) | X | X |
| Iridium Alloys (Ir) | X | |
| Titanium (Ti) | X | X |
| Copper (Cu) | X | X |
Target Materials for the Automotive PVD Coating Industry
We employ manufacturing methods to produce targets in the geometry that best fits your needs. Whether you are looking for a hot pressed metal, a bonded planar ceramic solution, a sprayed rotatable, or monolithic metal target. We can utilize our in-house capabilities to tailor a custom ceramic solution to your coating needs. And if you are interested in a specific alloy for development, we can work with you to create a custom metal alloy as well.
If there are other materials you would like quoted please feel free to reach out to us for a quote! This is a small sample size of materials we can provide for automotive coatings.
