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Semicon Europa dope: Getting to know you, getting to know all (or at least something) about you |
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Oct 11, 2007 at 01:55 PM |
At any major trade show---Semicon or otherwise---I feel compelled to meet some new folks and feel cheated unless I discover an as-yet-unexplored (at least for me) company with fresh ideas (or nicely rehashed ones).
The big-bruiser companies may also get my attention, but I have a soft spot for those battlin' little fellas, fighting the good fight despite increasingly daunting odds. Earlier this week in Stuttgart, I made the acquaintance of one such outfit, a young, Scottish-based MEMS equipment company with a compelling story---memmstar.
My first encounter with Peter Connock, the lower-case "m" company's chairman, and Mike Leavy, its CEO, came during the post-MEMS forum reception. After a bit of banter and a few laughs, we confirmed our "official meeting" for late the following afternoon on the show floor. Since I had joked about the company's slightly quirky name, one of the first things that Mike explained when we met the next day was what the corporate moniker actually meant. "It's MEMS surface treatment and release," he intoned in his charmingly self-deprecating burr. "The MEMS star.
So what do they wish upon this particular star? The company's vision, he explained, is to take "poorly served applications within MEMS and deliver key capabilities to achieve an integration of technologies and market acceptance of cost-effective, productive etch and deposition." Poorly served, underproductive applications in MEMS? Surely there must be some mistake! Who wouldn't trade his deeply etched eyeteeth for throughputs of ones of wafers per hour with process controls incorporating the finest in back-of-the-envelope sophistication! Hmmm, perhaps there is a market segment opening.
Memsstar isn't going after the established etch or dep segments, but has targeted the final- or release-etch step, using a highly selective vapor-phase technique rather than the usual problematic wet-etch suspects, then adding a protective coating of a very thin deposited film. Could this be a solution for how to etch under those cantilevers, channels, and bridges, leaving the increasingly small and complex structures freestanding and clean, and protecting them against the rigors of the packaging to follow? Mike claims there's "nothing in the ballpark" like the company's multichamber SPD tool, which incorporates etch and coat/dep in a single tool.
Instead of the typical "one product/one process" prevalent on Planet MEMS, the toolset can provide a range of etch and coating chemistries and thus offers "one platform for multiple types of MEMS devices...it's a new approach," Mike explained. Another key feature of the system is CCFT, the initialism for "continuous controlled flow technology." There are several, dare I say, advanced process monitors on board the tool---optical, interferometric, thermal (with ellipsometry and other APCs coming soon)---another bit of smart idea-borrowing from the latest generations of chipmaking equipment that memsstar and its 400-odd man-years of semi OEM experience bring to bear on the MEMS production front. "We can get within-wafer uniformities on a par with semiconductor processing," according to Leavy.
MEMS companies have told the memsstar team that they need more capable equipment solutions now, ones that can help solve some nagging manufacturability issues, especially as microelectromechanical device fabs ramp to 200-mm volume production for the first time. With several systems already in customers' hands, the company will have its first tools in "real" production environments in the first quarter of next year. The system's modularity is also a major selling and usability asset, Mike said. The same platform can be upgraded from R&D to pilot/low-volume to high-volume/integrated processing: "In all cases...we develop the process in the same module. All the controls are on it, on the R&D tool up to the high-volume manufacturing stage."
Another intriguing element in memsstar's gameplan is its recently announced strategic alliance with SAFC Hitech, the electronic chemicals division of Sigma-Aldrich. "We can ship a whole range of materials," according to Mike, including custom precursor and other formulations concocted with some help from SAFC. This goes a long way toward the customer getting a productivity pop---"the customers are getting a process," not just a tool.
It's rare enough to find semiconductor equipment makers and materials suppliers working in close cahoots, but to find such partnerships in the MEMS realm makes my micromachined heart want to release with joy---and raises my estimation of memsstar's ultimate prospects for success.
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