Automated Instrument for the Deposition of Thin Films Using Successive Ionic Layer Adsorption and Reaction

The development and improvement of thin film deposition techniques is an important research topic to obtain new materials at submicro and nano scale with high homogeneity and thickness control. Here, we designed and built an automated device for the deposition of binary or ternary compound films using Successive Ionic Layer Adsorption and Reaction (SILAR). The instrument is integrated by three different systems. The first system consists of a mobile platform of two degrees of freedom. The second part has an 8-bit microcontroller used to adjust the velocities along the horizontal and vertical axes. The third, the control system, uses a mobile app that can be implemented in smart devices, developed in free code software for programming and monitoring the main deposition parameters of the SILAR device such as the number of cycles, the immersion and emersion velocities, the residence time at each step, and the number of reactors. The performance of our instrument was verified through the deposition of PbS films, varying the number of deposition cycles to study the variations in the film thickness and structure, and assessed by profilometry, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy. The system demonstrated is useful to obtain crystalline films with controllable thicknesses.