Many of us ALD researchers have been talking – or even dreaming – about it for some years: an online database listing all ALD materials and processes. And now we have it! You can access it through the link at the top (or the menu on mobile devices) of the Atomic Limits blog.

You can click on an element to find ALD materials and processes reported (just scroll down the page) or you can just search the database through the search-function. Articles can easily be accessed through the web links given. You can also update it with missing or new processes (the database relies on crowdsourcing to make and to keep it up to date!) and these will be added after a quick evaluation by the content hosts. You can also leave comments and even make an instant figure (png-format) of the periodic table you are looking at. This can be helpful, for example if you want to use the Periodic Table in a presentation. And feel free to do so, since we distribute the image under Creative Commons BY 4.0 license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

As said we have been talking about it for years. There were even discussions on Twitter I remember. But things started to move quickly forward after posting the Periodic Table figure on this blog in the beginning of this year. Jan Buiter, who just received his MSc degree with us on a plasma ALD project, said that he could easily turn the Periodic Table in an online database. And so he did! In less than a week we had already a very nice website. Afterwards it was mainly fine tuning and updating.

Besides Jan Buiter and myself, several others were involved in this initiative. Also Harm Knoops, Bart Macco and Vincent Vandalon had important contributions. Furthermore Riikka Puurunen needs to be acknowledged for sure. Riikka had the original idea for the periodic table with ALD-prepared materials but she also talked several times about having such an ALD database. Note that the data in the database is also based on the data in the papers she (co-)authored: Riikka Puurunen, J. Appl. Phys. 97, 121301 (2005) and Ville Miikkulainen, Markku Leskelä, Mikko Ritala, and Riikka Puurunen, J. Appl. Phys. 113, 021301 (2013). Other major additions were based on the reviews by Harm Knoops, Tahsin Faraz, Karsten Arts and Erwin Kessels, to be published in J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 37 (2019) and Adrie Mackus, Joel Schneider, Callisto MacIsaac, Jon Baker and Stacey Bent, Chem. Mater. 31, 1142 (2019).

To end this post: please send us your comments on the database in case things can be improved. Please also add missing and newly developed processes. To keep the database up to date, we rely on the ALD community. And finally… simply enjoy using it!