By industrializing its portfolio of precision motion and sensing technologies, attocube is forging long-term commercial partnerships – and sustainable growth opportunities – with manufacturers of semiconductor production equipment. 

Relentless innovation meets relentless miniaturization: that’s been the defining mantra of the global semiconductor industry for decades. Even more so today, it seems, as competition intensifies across the semiconductor supply chain to deliver – at scale – the electronic building blocks for all manner of emerging technologies – from quantum computing and generative artificial intelligence to 5G/6G wireless networks and energy generation/storage systems for the net-zero transition. 

Underpinning all this collective endeavour are the semiconductor original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), many of them now racing to deliver ever-more exacting specifications for nanoscale motion, control and metrology in their production systems. “The semiconductor industry – with its sustained focus on denser chips and smaller devices – represents a huge growth opportunity for us,” explains Felix Reuter, attocube’s Head of Business Sector for Motion and Sensing. 
 

Cutting-edge industry solutions

Reuter, for his part, is front-and-centre in attocube’s strategic engagement with semiconductor OEMs, articulating the value proposition for attocube’s precision motion technologies across the myriad production machines and inspection systems needed to realize the next generation of semiconductor devices. The headline take: attocube’s precision motion and sensing products deliver all sorts of “must-haves” for the OEMs – not least their de facto compatibility with clean-room environments, elevated operating temperatures and the vacuum conditions that underpin extreme UV and electron-beam fabrication techniques. 

Strategic insights: “We are constantly learning and building up a more granular picture of the semiconductor ecosystem,” says Felix Reuter, attocube’s Head of Business Sector for Motion and Sensing.

The IDS3010, for example, is a compact and vacuum-ready displacement-measuring interferometer that’s designed for seamless integration – owing to sensor heads that can be remotely operated and interconnected via optical fibres – into space-constrained wafer-stage positioning applications. While its predecessor was originally developed for the academic research community – with applications ranging from synchrotron beamlines to quantum communications – the IDS interferometer embodies a radical redesign strongly focused on the needs of industry customers. 

“With the IDS, we took what was already a disruptive, first-of-its-kind product innovation and reimagined it for the industrial market,” says Reuter. In other words, a turnkey nanometrology system that combines ease of use with the ability to interface into a range of production machines. “Crucially,” he adds, “we also made the IDS more scalable from a manufacturing perspective, which means we can deliver thousands of these devices into diversified industry supply chains while ensuring the same levels of performance and reliability.”    

Another flagship product line is attocube’s family of piezoelectric nanopositioners – combining modular design, up to six degrees of freedom and vacuum compatibility – which are shaping up as the technology of choice for beam-steering and beam-shaping applications in optical and electron-beam semiconductor inspection systems.

Partnerships are the key to OEM success 

In every case, and with every OEM customer, the over-riding priority for Reuter and colleagues is to demonstrate that attocube’s motion and sensing portfolio delivers bulletproof reliability in a mass-production setting. Diversification is the name of the game and the attocube development team has broadened its technology strategy in the past decade to ensure the product offering is not only industry-ready, but compatible with a range of clean-room conditions as well as high- and ultrahigh-vacuum materials processing. 
 

“Our motion and sensing business is built on a proven track-record of success and collaboration with OEMs across the semiconductor supply chain,” says Reuter. That starts and ends, of course, with a granular understanding of the end-users’ application requirements – not least when it comes to navigating the complex transition from applied R&D lab and product evaluation to full-scale industrial production.

Flexibility and responsiveness are mandatory here, given that technical requirements will inevitably evolve across the development cycle for a new production machine. “Co-development partnerships are baked into the organizational DNA at attocube,” adds Reuter. “As such, we are extremely well positioned to facilitate semiconductor OEM requirements for manufacturing and process innovation.” 
 

Joe McEntee is a scientific editor based in South Gloucestershire, UK.