FHR Anlagenbau GmbH
A pioneer in thin film technology
A group of dedicated engineers from Dresden with many years of experience in thin film and micro-systems technology founded the company in 1991 with the aim of implementing modern functional coatings in customized coating system concepts.
Today we are The Thin Film Company.
Our customer base has grown steadily since our "pioneering days" more than 30 years ago and includes well-known, high-volume producers as well as small and medium size "hidden champions". Even in the very early development stages of their products and processes, industrial and academic researchers and developers build on our innovation and expertise in the field of functional coatings and present us with new challenges on a regular basis.
Then as now, our roots are in customized coating systems engineering. We have delivered more than 200 coating system platforms to date which allow us to draw upon a multitude of modular assemblies that have proven effective in practice.
We are experts when it comes to translating unique requirements into robust production systems and processes. We also develop high volume production systems customized to clients’ applications, handle pre-production qualification for you, or work with you to develop material compositions for the consumables (sputtering targets) used in our systems, specially customized to your requirements. Service and consulting is a matter of course for us and rounds up our portfolio.
Our core competencies in thin film technology
Engineering expertise
Engineering customized coating systems is just as much a core competence for FHR as deriving system platforms or implementing them in serial systems. Deposition of functional coatings under vacuum is what unites our systems.
Our ambition is also to make new research and development findings available for industrial applications. We take this path along with our customers, starting with the development of layer stacks and continuing on past pilot systems and finally scaling up to an industrial level.
We are the experts when it comes to translating very specific customer requirements into robust coating system concepts. We combine our knowledge of process technologies, mechanical design, software development and automation. Our specialty is to design customized coating systems in a way that they can be used to produce competitive products (cost of ownership).
Process engineering expertise
We have developed process engineering expertise for a variety of technologies.
These include:
- Reactive and non-reactive magnetron sputtering,
- Thermal evaporation,
- CVD and PECVD for highly efficient deposition of metals, oxides and nitrides,
- Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) for deposition of ultra-thin functional coatings with a uniform film thickness on complex 3D surfaces as well as
- Plasma-enhanced etching technologies for surface treatment and ultra-efficient material removal (high-rate etching).
The result is stable, production-ready processes. We are not satisfied until our customers produce functional coatings of the quality they want.
Material expertise
Material expertise is crucial for deposition of perfect functional coatings on a wide variety of substrates. That's why we are not only supplying the coating systems, but also the consumables that they need. For example, sputtering targets are developed and manufactured in-house by experts who know that the composition and grain structure of the starting material will affect the quality of the functional coatings they produce and our customers' final products as a result.