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The University of Oradea is working on developing a research base in material sciences with capabilities of vacuum deposition. The laboratory will be equipped with two deposition system along with with other research equipment, mainly an atomic force microscope and a Nano indenter for material characterization. This paper presents the continuity of our efforts to install two vacuum deposition systems that will be part of the SMARTMAT Laboratory at the University of Oradea. As steps were made in cleaning the equipment, we now focus on obtaining high vacuum. In this process, a constant monitoring solution of the pressure inside the chamber is required, and the steps taken to realize it are presented in this paper. The main focus of the paper is the data acquisition system implemented for monitoring several parameters of which vacuum is the most important. The system will be based on two Pfeiffer Gauges for vacuum and a National Instruments PXI system.

A new custom vacuum chamber with a substrate positioning system in our SMARTMAT laboratory is needed, as the previous one that we installed did not suit our needs. Based on our experiences with the old sputtering system, we designed a smaller vacuum chamber that could be attached to our existing load-lock system, and that could have a substrate positioning system suited for our magnetrons which would work with the load-lock. The new system replicates our initial experiments and is compatible with our experimental data acquisition system. We mounted the sensors and vacuum equipment on the chamber, and initial vacuum tests were a success, which validated our design.

Digital data acquisition is a must for precise data collection, and monitoring systems should be present on all modern equipment. This article focuses on improving the vacuum deposition systems already present in the SMARTMAT laboratory at the University of Oradea. Previous advancements have been made in installing vacuum chambers and digitally monitoring the vacuum level with the final objective of having a complete and versatile vacuum deposition system: magnetron sputtering, RF sputtering, and resistive heating. This article proposes a complex monitoring system based on modern sensors, data acquisition modules, and a processing and storage unit capable of monitoring all the vacuum deposition steps regarding the resistive heating system. The monitoring system can show real-time charts and store all the data in a database to be further used in modeling. As we already have a digital monitor system for the vacuum level, we have developed a monitoring system for temperature, voltage, and current, thus completing the design and controlling the whole evaporation process.

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