Whenever you browse the internet on your smartphone, rely on navigation in your car, or use energy-saving LED lights at home, thin films and coatings are quietly at work behind the scenes. They make electronic chips faster and more reliable, protect sensors in harsh environments, and ensure that modern devices become ever smaller while offering greater performance. By tuning just the outermost layers of a material, coatings can give it completely new properties—controlling how electricity flows, how light is reflected, or how surfaces interact with their surroundings. From semiconductors that drive powerful computers to medical devices that function smoothly inside the human body, new thin films and their combinations pave the way towards products that ease our daily lives.

The Coating Technologies group focuses on the fabrication of thin film materials with enhanced functional properties using advanced physical vapor deposition processes with the aim to drive innovations in different fields. This can be the development of better thin-film materials for communication or energy-efficient computing or the discovery of entirly new semiconducting materials for optoelectronics. 

Using high-throughput experimental techniques we can quickly identify promising new materials and deposition parameters. Coupled with innovative deposition processes this allows us to meet the increasing demands of next-generation technologies. Of particular interest for our research are high-energy non-equilibrium physical vapor deposition techniques such as high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS). Recent activities in this area include the development of piezoelectric and ferroelectric nitrides as well as the deposition of functional thin films on temperature-sensitive substrates. Another cornerstone of the groups research is surface and interface analysis, in particular using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Explore the main research topics of the group here. 

The group is furthermore engaged in a larger Empa coating research community applying thin-film and surface science solutions in various domains and applications.

The group owns several coating machines and has access to state-of-the-art characterization equipment. The coatings are fabricated mainly by plasma-based deposition techniques such as conventional magnetron sputtering, or ionized physical vapor deposition processes such as high-impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS). These processes enable unprecedented control of the properties of the thin films. A comprehensive infrastructure for high-throughput combinatorial experiments furthermore accelerates the development of new thin film materials. The group provides coating and analytical services in combination with research activities for internal and external academic partners as well as for industrial partners. You will find more information about the equipment and services of the group here.