Combinatorial screening of thin film materials: An overview

Over the past several decades, technological advancement has grown increasingly dependent on new and advanced materials . Accelerating the pace of new material discovery is thus critical to tackling global challenges in areas of energy, health, and security, for example. There is a pressing need to develop and utilize high throughput screening technologies for the development of new materials, as material discovery has fallen behind the product design cycles in many sectors of industry. This article describes techniques of high throughput combinatorial thin film material growth and characterization developed over the past several years. Although being adopted in selected industries, combinatorial screening technologies for thin film materials are still in their infancy. Caution must be exercised in selecting relevant combinatorial libraries and extrapolating from small-scale deposition techniques to industrially relevant processes. There are tremendous opportunities in the field of combinatorial discovery of thin film materials, as it enters its golden age along with the Materials Genome Initiative, which aims to change the pathway of materials discovery.