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Citing growing demand for a wide range of needed development programs by customers for 300mm Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) applications, SVTC Technologies and Entrepix, Inc. have joined forces to offer increasingly comprehensive services. A key aspect in the partnership is to enable customers to speed up qualification process time due to the growing project workloads of customer engineering units as limitations on resources increase.

“This partnership allows us to leverage each company’s individual strengths, with SVTC furnishing a state-of-the-art manufacturing environment with a full suite of process and metrology tools, and Entrepix providing a wealth of CMP engineering and operations experience,” said Dave Anderson, Vice President of Corporate Business Development at SVTC.

“Using our CMP FastForward suite of products and services that are designed to accelerate cost savings, development cycles and time-to-revenue, we have already demonstrated the clear benefits of outsourcing the CMP process at our Tempe facility,” said Tim Tobin, CEO, Entrepix. “Expanding into 300mm CMP services by partnering with SVTC at their state-of-the-art facility allows us to deliver these same benefits to advanced leading-edge technologies.”

In what is being billed by both companies as a ‘transparent process development’ offering, SVTC will outsource to Entrepix on behalf of its TAP customers work such as experimental planning and support, engineering project oversight and execution, data analysis, interpretation and reporting, as well as pilot production activities that relate to 300mm CMP processes. Entrepix’s engineering team will also perform services at SVTC - following the same outsourcing model Entrepix uses at its foundry in Tempe, Ariz.

“SemiQuest has been using SVTC’s state of the art 300mm CMP Tool Access Program for development of our advanced technology 300mm CMP pad,” said Rajeev Bajaj, Ph.D., President of SemiQuest, a consumables supplier. “Their additional metrology and support have helped us shorten our cycles of learning and save costs. We look forward to this new partnership enabling SemiQuest to build a successful business.”

“DuPont Air Products NanoMaterials has utilized SVTC’s 300mm CMP Tool Access Program as well as Entrepix’ foundry and equipment services for characterization and development of our advanced CMP slurry products,” said Ajoy Zutshi, Vice President, marketing and business development for DA NanoMaterials, a leading provider of electronic polishing products. “We are excited to hear about this new agreement and the combined strengths it will provide to further enable DA NanoMaterials to bring best-in-class solutions to the market.”

Entrepix noted that with the adoption of new processing materials and steps for leading-edge fabrication, CMP pad and slurry development would have to keep pace. New pad innovation requirements meant that there was a continual pipeline of new products requiring qualification.