PVD solutions for automotive thin film applications: Advancement of innovative sensors, lighting and LiDAR

As automotive lighting is in the transition from a simple combination of an incandescent light bulb with beam shaping reflective surfaces towards quite complex headlamps equipped white matrix LED in combination with transmission optics, the requirements to achieve a high efficiency also changed. While the former headlamps require a high reflectance, the latter design gains a high efficiency via a maximized transmittance. In addition, new challenges arise due to an increasing amount of cameras, new components like Lidar and sensors for driving safety in modern as well as future autonomous driving cars. Physical vapour deposition (PVD) thin film technologies are able to produce coatings for the previously mentioned applications but also offer extraordinary upside potential for future sensor technologies.