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The Grenoble model: LETI spinoff success stories, Part 2---Tronics |
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Oct 23, 2007 at 08:14 AM |
While both Soitec and Tronics represent successful spinoffs from the French micro/nanoelectronics research center, LETI, they occupy different ends of the spectrum.
Soitec has many hundreds of employees and counting, while MEMS foundry Tronics's headcount is pushing 60. Soitec went out on its own in 1997, while Tronics was born the same year, not leaving LETI physically until 2002-2003. Soitec makes SOI wafers, Tronics uses SOI wafers (albeit the thick variety) in about 90% of its custom MEMS processes. Soitec sells the engineered substrates to IDMs and foundries, Tronics is a foundry (although it prefers to call itself a "contract developer and manufacturer").
One thing the two companies do have in common, aside from their LETI roots, is profitability.
Tronics announced today that it achieved net profit yet again during its fiscal quarter ended Sept. 30. The privately held company says this marks its fifth consecutive profitable quarter and that it expects to be profitable for the fiscal year ending Dec. 31, largely on the strength of a 50% uptick in revenues compared to the 2006 numbers.
What's the big deal? According to Tronics, it is the "first pure-play contract manufacturer of advanced MEMS devices to achieve consistent profitability." While some foundries in the semiconductor realm seem to make money hand over fist, the emerging MEMS contract manufacturing space has not been so lucrative, making Tronics's feat all the more intriguing.
Why has the Tronics team managed to be in the black for more than a year? They are ace specialists in a field of widespread specialization.
Despite the recent CMOSization of some MEMS manufacturing, the majority rule still is "one product, one process." Tronics's business model thrives on this differentiation, since it can (as it says in the press release) "take complex MEMS concepts from design to product manufacturing, including wafer processing, assembly, custom packaging, and testing. The company also proposes some platforms for custom products.... [Some] 80% of Tronics' revenues are generated by recurrent products manufacturing."
In other words, this is not your typical "let us process your wafers and then you get to worry about the rest" type of operation---customers get completely validated components and systems.
Tronics' leased facilities in Crolles has the obligatory security fence around it, but little else to indicate that there's some very exclusive intellectual property on site. Vincent Gaff, the company's marketing and PR manager, gets a gold star for showing up for our discussions and to give me the tour, since he had been anxiously trying to find medical care for his ailing baby son earlier that day.
Vincent explained how the company "transforms concepts into real-world products" and creates "solutions to build complete supply chains." Tronics likes to keep the value-add high, its production volumes moderate, and its customer list under control, finding its sweet spot in that mix. They keep a lid on the total number of clients, a figure that hovers above 15 or so. Vincent said they are "very selective" about which customers they choose to work with: "We don't want to become too diversified."
He told me that the first products the company worked on were medical transducers, a continued area of expertise that includes recent development of implanable medical pressure sensors for one customer, which feature titanium packaging. The medical market accounts for 20-30% of Tronics's activity.
Instrumentation apps also take up a good portion of the company's efforts, including the Geophone sensor developed with Sercel, which is used for underground echographic seismic exploration and the subsequent creation of 3-D maps. Vincent noted how tricky the devices are to manufacture, so much so that Tronics had to come up with one of its reputation-building customized solutions. The Geophone devices require an extreme vacuum packaging process and specialized testing to go with it, something that can't be found off the shelf.
Part of Tronics's business includes some development and piloting work for certain automotive and IT customers, according to Vincent. Other clients get their wafers done elsewhere and send them to Crolles for test, assembly, and packaging. In addition to actuator/micromirror, various sensors, RF MEMS, and such, a growing revenue stream has come from customers wanting lab-on-chip and other microfluidic devices.
The company migrated from 100-mm (4 inch) to 150-mm (6 inch) processing in 2006, and brought its own test/assembly/packaging subfacility on line that same year. Device-per-wafer counts range from the low end (under 100?) for larger navigation-type MEMS to about 280 per wafer for the Geophones to as many as 2000 per wafer for others. Vincent explained that Tronics is in no hurry to move to 200 mm wafers, although future capacity needs or competitiveness reasons eventually may make that transition necessary.
The core process technology at Tronics is deep vertical etch of thick SOI with a sacrificial/cavity release, although epitaxial SOI surface micromachining and non-SOI gold metal-based surface micromachining are among process solutions also in the house. Vincent said that the "big companies need SOI technology for accelerometers, gyroscopes, micromirrors," and the like. The company recently announced that it was working with tool supplier Alcatel Micro Machining on advancing deep RIE etch technology and systems.
During our walk-through of the facilities, Vincent pointed our the characterization/reliability lab, something "you wouldn't find in a normal MEMS foundry; it would normally be at the customer's." He noted that Tronics does a fair amount of work in this lab for customers, checking devices at the prototype stage and correlating that with the models, then setting up the necessary indicators in the fab. The lab also plays a role in Tronics's FMEA (that's not FEMA folks, but "failure modes and effects analysis," so no emergency management here) program, a critical piece of the company's advanced process control, yield enhancement, and failure reduction/reliability efforts.
The fab itself features several etch, deposition, thermal, plating (they do alot of metals there), cleaning, and bonding toolsets, but no stepper or scanner can be found in the cleanroom. Vincent told me the proximity/contact litho system in use is still adequate for their needs, although the company will eventually acquire a stepper. They also have CMP capability, an increasingly critical process step for dealing with thin wafers and the polishing of moving parts on certain MEMS devices. A fairly recent addition to the metrology/inspection/analysis equipment roster is a high-speed holographic interferometer, which can quickly image and characterize structures.
The company also has a wide variety of customized testing tools for a company its size, from a drop-tower shock tester (don't try this at home) to a high-precision rotating table for checking gyroscope acceleration to a pressure-sensor bench with a hot plate and mini-vacuum chamber. Many of the devices and components they work on don't have standard testing procedures, let alone the equipment to carry them out. Unlike the more-standardized IC industry, "every protocol is different from one component to the next" (100% of which are tested at Tronics). He cited a few specific examples. "How do you measure a micropump at the wafer level? How do you test at the wafer, component, and packaging levels? That is a challenge, especially for something like microfluidics."
But when you live in a world of customization like the Tronics team, every day presents new challenges---and the opportunities that come with them. And that's exactly how they like it.
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