Vacuum plasma deposition has been the mainstay of the thin film industry since its inception. In particular magnetron sputter based processes have come to the forefront due to the inherent stability and scalability of the technique. However, the method has to constantly re-invent itself in order to provide better solution for the ever-changing world of micro-electronics and consumer products. New generations of products are also being created that rely partly or completely on new sputter based processes. This in turn can require radical changes to the usual production methods. The presentation will highlight the state-of-the art in sputter technology and in particular a number of areas that will drive further market expansion and technical advancement in the field. Some examples will include thin film batteries where virtually every feature relies upon sputtered layers of a low or high tech. nature. Due to the miniature and highly efficient nature of the product, it opens up the possibility of providing "power" to many new product classes and new devices. Thin film solar cells that have the ability to create efficient conversion of energy via a low cost and lightweight structure may lead to a reduction of societies dependence upon fossil fuels. The introduction of vertical magnetic recording comes ever closer if longitudinal recording is limited to <200 Gbit/in2. Vertical recording can potentially achieve terabyte recording density, but places much higher demands on the process equipment and magnetron source technology. Another high growth area is display technology. The emergence of high definition large area LCD displays puts a corresponding demand upon the digital video disk storage capacity. New disk formats such have Blu-ray have been shown to offer up to 3x the storage capacity. In addition the possibility of a high and low video formats on a single disk means the creation of two separate recording media in a single production process.