When a regional unit of a midsize chip/nano/MEMS/etc.
equipment company outgrows its workspace and needs to move into bigger digs, that it has hired eight new employees with plans to bring on another 16, and that it has just had its biggest month ever and expects to see 50% growth this year, those are usually signs of a thriving operation. In EV Group's case, these signs reflect not only the strength of the Austrian company's technology and product line, but that certain key markets it serves---MEMS, advanced packaging, flexible electronics, LEDs, among others---have been gathering serious momentum.
I visited EVG's North America headquarters in Tempe, AZ, Monday morning. My host was Jeff Hawks, who manages the company's Midwest sales territory. He's been with the company for seven years, following seven years as an Intel litho guy. Jeff told me that the company will be moving into a larger office space within the next quarter or so in its Flexible Display Center site, where EVG is the largest tenant and contributor of equipment to the research pilot line. Because of a big jump in the company's installed tool base in North America, Jeff told me the reason for the hiring boomlet is the need for more applications and process engineers, technologists, and customer support people to manage the growth.
Thin-wafer handling and temporary bonding/debonding for advanced chip packaging, various MEMS applications, LEDs, and silicon-on-insulator are among the growth drivers. Since EVG has been a key supplier to MEMS manufacturers for all of the company's 25+ years, it has benefitted from the long-awaited arrival of volume MEMS manufacturing in the automotive and consumer markets, especially cellphones employing MEMS microphones and accelerometers as well as the MEMSification of game consoles such as Nintendo's Wii.
Jeff said he has been seeing more interest in the MEMS market from chipmakers, who want to use older 150- and 200-mm fabs, with largely refurbished toolsets, as a relatively low-cost method for entry into the burgeoning MEMS business or for expanding their extant MEMS product lines. Running counter to the trends of offshored production or the fabless approach, this return to domestic production has started to breathe new life into the fab community in the U.S. and Canada, he believes.
In one example of the learning curve faced by some customers who know chips much better than they know MEMS, Jeff described the confusion around the term "thick resist." Chip guys think "thick" means 5 microns or so, but in the MEMS world that could be 20, 100, or even a couple hundred microns of resist, a range of thicknesses well within the capabilities of EVG's coating tools.
As for LEDs, Jeff pointed out that two of EVG's advantages with its bonding and integrated lithography systems are the ability to handle the very small wafers used to fabricate the devices and the capability to handle all kinds of what he calls "exotics," such as III-V and II-VI compounds. In another strong market, SOI, Jeff cited EVG's dominant share of the bonding-equipment space and its close ties with both SOITEC and MEMC as well as the volume production by "mainline chip companies" using the bonded wafers.
A looksee through the window into the FDC pilot-line cleanrooms reminded me that EVG has the lion's share of the equipment at the center, including the large-area spray coater and bonding/debonding systems specially designed for the consortium. FDC hit a milestone last year, as it installed and qualified its GenII tool set and successfully fabbed proof-of-concept display wafers and glass. EVG also runs its own customer wafers there, proving, as Jeff said, that "we have no problem going head to head with our competitors."
Although proven-concept wafers and low-volume levels are all well and good, the accepted wisdom is that flexible displays and other electronics products will likely have to run in some sort of roll-to-roll manufacturing scheme, in order to bring costs way down. When I asked Jeff whether EVG was considering those kind of tools, he said that they were looking into "linear approaches."
EVG has often been perceived by industry observers as one of those interesting "little" European equipment companies that generates a nice profit with a lot of R&D and niche apps. As some of those niches expand or outright blow up and certain technologies segue from research to production mode, EVG's recent exponential growth may be a sign of things to come.
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