Materion expands ground coating cell facility
Materion Barr Precision Optics & Thin Film Coatings, a Materion Corporation business, is constructing a 3,000-square-foot class 1000 clean room outfitted with the market's latest infrared coating chambers and 3D patterning equipment.
The work cell will significantly enhance Materion's capability to manufacture low-defect coatings in high volume for the infrared wafer level, defence and consumer electronics markets.
The Wafer Level Coating Cell, located at Materion's facility in Westford, Massachusetts, is specifically designed to be self-contained with a semiconductor manufacturing layout to handle 200mm wafers.
The multi-million dollar investment will assist in decreasing the cost of uncooled micro bolometer detectors and ultimately facilitate major growth throughout the commercial infrared camera industry.
The new Wafer Level Coating Cell meets current market demand requirements as well as being in the forefront of future market needs. Materion says it also enhances competencies across many other technologies in which the firm has competitive differentiation, such as gesture control filters, arrays, gas sensing filters, and others.
Completion of the work cell is expected to finish in the third quarter of 2013 and will include a state-of-the art 3D photolithography deposition tool, semiconductor wet etch and alignment processing tools, semi-automated inspection tools, and several custom-designed high-volume 200mm coating deposition chambers.
The long-range plan foresees a total of 20,000 to 40,000 wafers per year when fully built out. Initial work will be composed of multiple volume production lines along with current projects aimed at the defence, commercial infrared and consumer electronics markets.
Materion will continue to refine processes and operations during the following year to maximise yields, optimise processes and ramp-up to full capacity.
What's more, Materionis is continuing to invest in its coating technology for the next generation micro-bolometer devices (less than 12 micron) and plans to unveil this new technology in 2014.
Materion Barr Precision Optics & Thin Film Coatings provides a broad array of technologies including complex optical filters, filter arrays, lens coatings and optical thin film component assemblies.
The markets are composed of commercial, defence, life sciences and medical, thermal imaging, automotive, and space, science and astronomy industries.
