Peter Joseph Clarke, 71, Founder and President, Sputtered Films Inc.
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 6/1/2002
Peter Joseph Clarke, 71, founder and president of Sputtered Films Inc. (Santa Barbara, Calif.), died May 1.
Before founding Sputtered Films in 1967, Mr. Clarke worked at the General Electric Research Laboratory (Schenectady, N.Y.). He later joined Veeco Instruments (Plainview, N.Y.), where he worked in the product development labs on vacuum system products.
In 1965, Mr. Clarke invented the S-Gun, the first commercially successful magnetron sputtering device, the core of the production machines he developed and patented in his company. His cassette-to-cassette wafer metalizer (the C-to-C Coater) was the industry's first automated system used to vacuum-coat wafers using physical vapor deposition (PVD). It is still in use at Bell Labs, Motorola and other companies around the world.
With the development of the Endeavor cluster tool, Sputtered Films moved into the world of robotic wafer transfer and computer-controlled wafer processing under vacuum. Endeavor systems are used to manufacture system interconnects and in under-bump metalization. Mr. Clarke also developed the Shamrock MR/GMR orbital planetary PVD system, which produces magnetoresistive and giant magnetoresistive thin films.
Mr. Clarke held numerous patents and authored many scientific articles relating to reactive sputtering. He was honored as the 1998 recipient of both the Albert Nerken Award and the Nathaniel Sugerman Award.
At the time of his death, he was in the final stages of testing the Flat Gun, his fifth-generation S-Gun. Sputtered Films will release the Flat Gun later this year.
Mr. Clarke is survived by his wife, Carole, five children and eight grandchildren.
