PLATIT

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PLATIT AG

Type	Private (Swiss AG)
Founded	1992
Headquarters	Grenchen, Switzerland
Key people	Erich Blösch, President Tibor Cselle, CEO
Industry	industrial engineering and manufacturing
Products	surface technologies
Parent	BCI Group
Website	www.platit.com

Platit AG is a Swiss company that manufactures and markets coating equipment for the cutting tool industry. It is widely regarded as a technology leader in Physical vapor deposition (PVD) coating technology.

Platit was founded in 1992. The company's headquarters are located in Grenchen, Switzerland. Manufacturing plants are located in Switzerland and the Czech Republic. There are 12 sales offices on 4 continents. ^[1]

Platit's CEO is Dr. Tibor Cselle. Platit is wholly owned and controlled by BCI Group, a Swiss conglomerate that focusses on products for the Swiss watch industry.

Platit is often spelled in all-caps: PLATIT.

Competitors include Unaxis (Balzers), Sulzer (Metaplas Ionon), and Cemecon.

[edit] Products

PVD coatings are typically applied to cutting tools - such as drills or endmills -, molds and dies, and machine components to extend their lifetime. Typical PVD coatings include Titanium nitride (TiN), TiCN, or TiAlN.

Platit manufactures coating units to deposit PVD coatings. Tools or machine components are loaded into a vacuum chamber, and heated to several hundred degrees Celsius to start a process in which metal from cathodes is evaporated and deposited on the substrates. Typically, cathodes are planar (flat), while Platit's LARC process (LAteral Rotated Cathodes) features cylindrical cathodes that have several advantages over the traditional setup, including the ability to deposit smooth coating surfaces and nanocomposite structures ^[2] ^[3].

As Platit's customers are generally small- to medium-size companies, their coating units tend to be smaller in chamber size and capacity than competitor's models, which are often aimed for use in larger operations.