DSI The Early Years

DSI THE EARLY YEARS

In 1986, the year that the Coca-Cola Company introduced New Coke, optically coated products were manufactured based on a company’s only thin film coating process, basically one deposition technology per company. Whatever they had is what they forced as a solution. It was rare to find a company that had more than one technology to offer to their customers. The founders recognized the competitive advantage possible if several coating technologies were available, eliminating the need to “force a square peg into a round hole”.  A conscious effort was made to find potential customers with unique product requirements and the financial ability to fund “best fit technology” development.

DSI’s Name

Two of the original owners of our company, Lee Bartolomei and Norman Bolling had a meeting with our first potential customer.  The name that was originally decided on was “Innotech”.  During the meeting, the customer asked if we had decided on a name, and he hoped that it was not going to be some variant of “Innovation”.  Needless to say, because of this meeting, Lee and Norm returned home and began the process of coming up with another company name.

Our company was founded with the mission of “developing a coating process to fit our customer’s needs”. Therefore, Deposition Sciences, Inc. became the name of the company.  After 37 years DSI still works in close collaboration with our customers to develop innovative coatings that achieve specific requirements.

Our First Customer

1986-1991

GE Research Labs in Schenectady, NY developed a new coating process that was ideal for achieving uniform coatings over very complex shapes.  GE Lighting in Cleveland, OH recognized the advantage of this technology for coatings on light bulbs and built two small pilot machines . Their staff had little experience with multilayer optical thin films and were experiencing absorption and thick coating stress problems.  They hired us to collaborate and help develop a process for IsoDyn Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition (LPCVD) for use on energy efficient tungsten-halogen light bulbs.  Our first LPCVD machine, #103 enabled DSI to study the process in Santa Rosa; however, that did not last long. The next machine, #104 was built and still is running today after modifications and upgrades.