A combinatorial sputter coating system has been developed that can optimize the crystal preferred orientation of coating films. With this system, it is possible to synthesize various kinds of coatings whilst precisely controlling conditions such as the sputter gas, the gas pressure, the gas partial pressure, the r.f. power, the substrate temperature, the distance between the substrate and target, etc. In this way, we successfully synthesized copper oxide coatings with different crystal preferred orientations, and low frictional property was obtained by optimizing the crystal preferred orientation. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.