Picosun Group, a leading supplier of advanced Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), has reaffirmed its place in watchmaking.
The provider of thin film coating solutions, has shown dominance in the industry with repeat production system sales to prominent timepiece manufacturers.
Coating of watch parts is a prime example of ALD’s brand, aiming to give applications outside of the traditional wafer-based semiconductor manufacturing.
ALD films can be used to give the coated object a lustrous colour which, due to the films’ uniformity and conformity, is even all around the object and doesn’t vary between objects or batches.
A key aspect is the protective function of the ALD film. As the ALD films are intrinsically pinhole-, crack- and defect-free, they form an airtight encapsulation around the coated object which prevents tarnishing and corrosion.
Watchmakers are not the only ones who have adopted ALD, jewellery manufacturers have also used ALD to produce an anti-tarnish surface finish to their products.
Juhana Kostamo, managing director of the Picosun Group, said: “Picosun’s goal is to provide agile, comprehensive, and production-proven ALD technology throughout the global industrial field. ALD solutions for non-wafer 3D objects such as watch parts are Picosun’s speciality, an area where we have worked in close collaboration with our customers already for a decade. This has gained us the leading know-how and experience in this particular application area, making Picosun the go-to partner for all manufacturers seeking for a revolutionary way to improve their products to the cutting-edge of their respective markets.”
Picosun is based in Finland, with subsidiaries in Europe, North America, Singapore, Taiwan, China, and Japan, and a world-wide sales and support network.
