Hot wire chemical vapor deposition: recent progress, present state of the art and competitive opportunities

Hot Wire CVD (also called Catalytic CVD or initiated CVD) is an elegant low pressure deposition technique for the deposition of functional films, both inorganic and organic, based on the decomposition of precursor sources at a heated metallic surface. The conformal deposition of thin films on rigid substrates or flexible foil substrates, whether in-line or batch type, is very straightforward, since it is plasma-free (i.e. without the risk of a damaging bombardment of energetic ions) and it is easily scalable. An increasing variety of thin film materials can be obtained with this method, with good feedstock gas utilization and high deposition rate. Progress has been made in establishing stable and reproducible conditions for the hot catalytic wires used for efficient decomposition of the source gases. In this paper we discuss some of the current research issues in this field.