INSTRAS SCK200P Spincoater
I picked up an SCK200P Spincoater on ebay. It’s a pretty cheap setup but it’s a kind of neat design. Here are my first quick impressions and a bunch of pictures.
It’s basically, it’s made from off shelf parts, the main controller is a “Fly-dream RC multi-functional tester”. It’s box designed for testing the brushless DC motors they use. The tester and the motor were both designed for the hobbiest radio controlled vehicle market. The spin unit itself is has the motor mounted on a block of thick acrylic. The the chuck attached to the motor is then mounted inside a CD case, the kind of case they use when you buy a bunch of CDRs. That’s actually a nice feature as I can see it being easy to replace. The chuck is exactly 2inches, and the 2inch wafers I have fit on it exactly.
Spinning was pretty easy as you can see in the video above. They provide double sided tape to stick the substrate down (more on this later). The substrate was pretty dirty which caused some issues, but the process otherwise worked well. The biggest problem was removing it! I couldn’t get it off the double sided tape without breaking it. I’ll have to think about how to get round that. I think a jig to hold the substrate in place would be ideal.
Overall I’m reasonably pleased with it so far. That fact that it’s made from standard parts is rather nice, and makes the whole thing quite hackable.
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