Precious Metal Coatings

Teer Coatings Ltd provides a PVD Magnetron Sputtering coating service for a wide range of precious metals. These coatings can be combined with adhesion layers, depending on the application, comprising of either titanium (Ti), chromium (Cr), NiCr or nickel (Ni).  The thickness of the precious metal coatings can be precisely controlled giving advantages such as uniformity and material usage and thus cost which, subject to coating system loading, can offer advantages over electroplated precious metal coating processes. These coatings can be offered on to a wide range of substrate materials including different metals, ceramics, glass, and plastics.

Gold (Au).

Gold coatings can be difficult to adhere to many different substrate materials, so we offer this coating with different adhesion layers such as titanium (Ti), chromium (Cr), NiCr or nickel (Ni) depending on the application. The gold coatings can generally range in thickness from 10nm up to 1.5 microns in thickness. Certain applications may require thicker coatings but generally gold sputtered via PVD Magnetron Sputtering does not need to be of the same thickness as electroplated gold coatings. 

Platinum (Pt)

Platinum coatings tend to adhere better than gold but can also be offered with a range of adhesion layers such as titanium (Ti), chromium (Cr), NiCr or nickel (Ni) depending on the application. Platinum coatings can range in thickness from 10nm up to 1 micron in thickness. Thicker coatings can also be offered in certain applications. 

Silver (Ag)

Silver coatings can be difficult to adhere to many different substrate materials so typically we offer this coating with a titanium (Ti) adhesion layer to improve the adhesion level if required.  Thickness for Ag coatings range from 100nm up to 5 microns dependent on the application. Where thicker Ag layers are required on substrates where Ag is difficult to guarantee adhesion a PVD coated Ti + Ti/Ag / Ag layer can be used with then electroplated Ag on top of the PVD Ag to the required thickness.

Palladium (Pd) and Ruthenium (Ru)

We can offer palladium and ruthenium coatings although we only have a small source for these coatings so the size of components we can coat is limited. These coatings can be offered with or without adhesion layers depending on the substrate material and the application. Coating thickness ranges from 10nm up to 1 micron.