Dr. James A. Greer founded PVD Products in 1995 to develop and sell large-area Pulsed Laser Deposition systems. In his previous job at Raytheon’s Research Division, Dr. Greer developed prototype equipment with ability to scale the PLD process up to 200 mm in size. At that time Dr. Greer felt there was a need for such tools in the R&D market place and left Raytheon to build a variety of Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) based tools for R&D.
Dr. Greer quickly won a Phase II SBIR from Wright Patterson Air Force Base to develop a large area PLD system to handle up to 5-inch diameter substrates. This machine was specifically designed to grow HTS materials and it has been used to grow high quality YBCO and other materials on substrates up to 125 mm (5-inch) in diameter. The outcome of this SBIR was the PLD 5000 system. A full line of smaller and larger systems soon followed.
In 1996 PVD Products was merged into Epion Corporation. As the VP of Engineering of Epion Corporation, Dr. Greer continued to develop and sell large-area PLD systems as well as other PVD and ion beam tools including Gas Cluster Ion Beam processors. Dr. Greer helped Epion Corporation grow from four to over sixty people in four years and Epion was soon acquired in September 2000 by JDSU. At that point Dr. Greer left Epion/JDSU and re-started PVD Products to pursue PVD R&D tools for all types of thin film physical vapor deposition techniques with his own funds.
Since then, PVD Products has been selling a wide variety of high quality PLD systems, magnetron sputtering systems and sources, thermal and e-beam evaporators. PVD Products has completed over 280 projects to date varying in size from $1,000 to over $2.5M USD. About 1/2 of our sales have been for international clients around the world. A wide variety of our PLD systems including dual-beam laser systems, and combinatorial deposition systems, multiple types of coated conductor systems are now operating in many well known research labs worldwide. Due to our high product integrity PVD Products has many repeat customers that have purchased multiple machines from us over the years.
PVD Products has grown significantly over the past few years. We have hired Mr. Larry Bourget as COO to help with the rate of growth. Larry has extensive experience in the main stream semiconductor field and has acted as Engineering Manager and Special Products Manager at ASTeX, MSK, and Axcelis. Currently, Mr Bourget is responsible for all of engineering and production at PVD Products.
In June of 2012 PVD Products moved to its current facility. Conveniently located 30 minutes (20 miles) north of Boston, PVD Products occupies a modern 17,000 square foot manufacturing facility. We have 5,800 square feet of clean production space, and 1,425 square feet for our applications lab that includes a PLD/MBE 2300 with dual UHV Magnetrons, and sputter deposition systems along with an AMRAY 3600 FE SEM with EDS unit.