| Type | Private (Swiss AG) |
|---|---|
| Industry | industrial engineering and manufacturing |
| Founded | 1992 |
| Headquarters | Grenchen, Switzerland |
| Key people | Erich Blösch, President Tibor Cselle, CEO |
| Products | surface technologies |
| Parent | BCI Group |
| Website | |
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 Selzach, Switzerland. Manufacturing plants are located in Switzerland and the Czech Republic. There are 19 sales offices on 34 countries.[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 Ionbond, Hauzer Techno Coating, Unaxis (Balzers), Sulzer (Metaplas Ionbond), and Cemecon.
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 Cathodic arc 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]
Platit introduced the Open Source TripleCoating3 in September 2010
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.