(FORTUNE Magazine) – THIS WINTER Ford Motor Co. will offer a windshield that clears itself of crusted ice in a matter of minutes. A layer of silver in the glass so thin it's invisible carries an electric current that heats the surface. Ford tried the idea a decade ago but couldn't get the layer thin enough. Now the automaker is using a common computer industry technique called sputtering to do the job. The process dislodges groups of atoms in small bursts and spreads them uniformly across a surface. With computer sales sluggish, manufacturers of sputtering equipment are looking for new ways to apply the technology. Though it has long had limited use outside Silicon Valley -- to tint eyeglasses, for instance, or coat razor blades with corrosion-resistant platinum -- sputtering has been most prominent in the production of semiconductors. Sales of sputtering equipment to the semiconductor industry totaled about $300 million last year, according to Dan Hutcheson, a vice president of VLSI Research, a market research firm in San Jose. But this year he thinks new orders will be down 50%. The process isn't new. Discovered in 1852, when it was called ''cathode disintegration,'' sputtering is similar to what happens inside a burned-out light bulb. The darkened insides are carbon atoms from the exhausted filament. They collect uniformly because of the relative vacuum inside the bulb. In sputtering, electromagnetic fields direct a stream of ions of chemically inert argon gas in a vacuum chamber at a particular substance -- silver, in the case of the Ford windshield -- like a cue ball scattering a bunch of billiard balls. The silver atoms then bounce onto a ''substrate,'' or the thing to be coated. Sputtering produces a uniformly thin layer, about a millionth of a + meter, or about one-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. The thinness conserves raw material, a plus when manufacturing calls for such costly metals as platinum and gold. Along with such applications as Ford's windshield, computer hard disks are a promising market for sputtering. Most hard disks are made by a process called spin-coating, in which a layer of magnetic oxide is bonded to the disk by centrifugal force. Because of unevenness on the surface, however, about half the disks must be thrown away. Lindata Corp., of Santa Clara, California, uses sputtering to make magnetic disks. Peter Tegan, vice president of marketing and sales, claims that more than 80% of sputtered disks are usable. The new optical disks, which use laser technology, could be a big market too. Though magnetic disks are faster and more flexible, optical disks could eventually store billions of bytes of information, vs. about ten million for magnetic disks. Sheldon Weinig, chairman of Materials Research, a sputtering equipment maker in Orangeburg, New York, thinks sputtering is well suited to optical disks. Data someday might be stored at various levels within the optical disk, he says, like an ''apartment building'' of memory, where all the phone numbers of Manhattan are stored on the top floor, addresses on another floor, and maybe Beethoven symphonies on a third floor.