News Article
Tool purchase aimed at advanced MEMS accelerometer fabrication
Tegal Corporation has announced it has received an order for an Endeavor AT PVD cluster tool from a preeminent maker of commercial MEMS accelerometers and inertial sensors.
Tegal Corporation has announced it has received an order for an Endeavor AT PVD cluster tool from a preeminent maker of commercial MEMS accelerometers and inertial sensors. The Endeavor system will join the installed base of Tegal plasma etch equipment already in use by this customer to produce 2-axis and 3-axis MEMS accelerometers for the automotive and consumer electronics markets."We successfully demonstrated the wafer handling and film deposition capabilities of the Endeavor AT PVD system for MEMS sensor fabrication, and we are pleased to have been selected for this order on the basis of those results," said Scott Brown, Vice President, North American Sales, of Tegal Corporation. "The Endeavor's versatility in handling thin MEMS wafers, with and without wafer carriers, together with the extendibility of the Endeavor AT to even larger and thinner wafers, allows our customer to be confident about their technology roadmap for future generations of advanced MEMS inertial sensors."The commercial market for MEMS motion sensors is taking a great leap forward this year, with MEMS-enabled functions, such as motion-responsive play on the Wii game system from Nintendo, and the rotating display on the new Apple iPhone, capturing popular attention. Imaginative applications of MEMS sensors, combined with decreasing prices, are expected to produce a whole new range of must-have consumer electronic products, along with creating additional functionality to the billion cell phone handsets expected to ship in each of the next few years.
