40 Years of ALD in Finland - Photos, Stories (Twitter: #FinALD40)

In 1974, Dr. Tuomo Suntola and his group demonstrated the growth of ZnS thin films in alternating, saturating gas-solid reactions. This initiated the development of Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) in Finland and gradually led to industrial and academic activities worldwide. The famous patent on Atomic Layer Epitaxy (FIN 52359) was filed on November 29, 1974.

In 2014, the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Atomic Layer Deposition organized an exhibition: "40 Years of ALD in Finland: Photos, Stories". Initially, the exhibition was presented at the international Baltic ALD conference, May 12-13, 2014, Helsinki (http://www.aldcoe.fi/bald2014/). The exhibition has also visited the ALD 2014 conference in Kyoto, Japan (http://www.ald2014.org/). 

Exhibition material was released to the internet as pdf on 29.11.2014 via the VPHA website and the ALDCoE website, with added preface by Prof. Markku Leskelä. 

On the basis of the story of Tuomo Suntola written for the FinALD40 exhibition, an essay was published in a scientific journal by R. L. Puurunen, "A short history of Atomic Layer Deposition: Tuomo Suntola's Atomic Layer Epitaxy", Chemical Vapor Deposition 20 (2014) 332-344, DOI: 10.1002/cvde.201402012 (Open Access). The following image with silhouette of Suntola and a scheme of the first ALE reactor was created to accompany the essay and the FinALD40 exhibition (shared with Creative Commons licence in Wikimedia Commons). 

Figure: Reconstruction of the first atomic layer epitaxy (ALE) experiment in 1974. Tuomo Suntola standing next to the ALE reactor, observing the appearance of purple interference colour in the growing film. The reactor scheme has been modified by Riikka Puurunen together with Suntola from original scheme by Suntola, published (Figure 2, middle) in: R. L. Puurunen, “A Short History of Atomic Layer Deposition: Tuomo Suntola's Atomic Layer Epitaxy,” Chemical Vapor Deposition 20 (2014) 332-344; https://doi.org/10.1002/cvde.201402012. The silhouette photograph on the left has been taken by Riikka Puurunen of Tuomo Suntola on August 23, 2014 - almost exactly 40 years after the first ALE experiment was made. This reconstruction image was used as the cover of the internet version of the exhibition material “40 Years of ALD in Finland - Photos, Stories”. (By Riikka Puurunen and Tuomo Suntola - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction_of_the_first_atomic_layer_epitaxy_experiment_by_Tuomo_Suntola.jpg)