Designing Low-Cost Arduino Powered Spin Coater for Thin Film Deposition

Abstract

In the present work, we have designed a low-cost spin coater using the Arduino Uno board. The advantage of selecting Ardunio is, it has pulse width modulation (PWM) based pins. Depending on the width of the pulse, the output voltage changes which will intern changes the speed of the DC motor connected to the PWM pin. The thickness of deposited film using spin coater depends on RPM and duration of rotation. The rotation of the substrate during deposition has three stages a gradual increase in RPM, maintaining constant RPM over a while, and a gradual decrease in RPM. All these parameters can be controlled by an Arduino board. An Aluminum doped Zinc Oxide film was deposited on glass substrate using Arduino based spin coater. X-ray diffraction, UV – VIS spectroscopy, and FTIR methods were used as characterization techniques. Hexagonal crystal structure of deposited AZO layer was confirmed by XRD and optical band gap, transparency were calculated by UV-VIS spectroscopy.