Core Competencies
As thin film technologies become more complex—with tighter tolerances, demand for high reproducibility, and greater flexibility—there is a growing need for intelligent, reliable, and adaptive production systems. The future of advanced manufacturing will rely on cyber-physical systems seamlessly integrated into production environments to deliver consistent, high-quality results, even for small or high-value batches.
FIP-SPE@FCU is an innovation centre that focusses on future coating production systems, combined expertise of the partners in materials science, production technology, and process simulation.
WE ARE FOCUSING ON
• Plasma deposition techniques involving HIPIMS, Gas flow sputtering (GFS), PECVD.
• Design of atmospheric plasma systems for agriculture, food preservation, and air purification.
• CDIO based talent training for innovative engineering purposes.
• Immersive Display System Human Factors.
• Robot collaborative environment.
• Development of optical multilayer coatings by reactive magnetron sputtering.
• Plasma emission monitoring and broadband optical control.
• Thin film simulation and characterization by optical design and COMSOL/ACE+ modeling, spectroscopic ellipsometry, UV-VIS-NIR measurements.
• Electrical and thickness analysis of films.
• Optical thin film filter design.
• Optical lens design.
• Advanced optical coating technology.
• Precision optical measurement technology.
• Machine vision with human-machine interface.
• Computer vision, CNN, LSTM, deep learning-based process optimization.
• Smart parameter optimization for production.
• Experimental design and intelligent modeling.
• Development of intelligent control modules using AI and evolutionary algorithms.
Fraunhofer IST also brings a wide range of fields of competence into the cooperation:
Sputtering technology
- Magnetron sputtering
- Reactive sputtering
- HIPIMS
- Gas flow sputtering (GFS)
Industrialization
- Advanced coating equipment development
- EOSS®
- Modular optical coating control application (MOCCA+®)
- Gas flow sputtering systems
Simulation and digital services
- Particle-in-cell Monte Carlo (PIC-MC) / Direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC)
- Simulation of particle transport
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
- Digitalization
- Digital twin of plasma based deposition processes
Optical and electrical systems
- Precision optical coatings and equipment
- Monitoring equipment for control of thin film deposition processes
- Large area coating
- Electrical systems
- insulating coatings
- conductive coatings
- sensors (e. g. strain gauges)