i3 Emphasizes Tool Flexibility and Vendor Support
ClassOne, the premier supplier of new electroplating and wet process tools to the 200mm and smaller semiconductor manufacturing industry, today announced the sale of its flagship Solstice® S8 CopperMax™ electroplating tool to i3 of Binghamton, NY. i3 is rapidly expanding its St. Petersburg, FLfacility to accommodate volume production work, and they need an automated plating tool with the ability to grow in tandem. CopperMax™ has been chosen to cost-effectively automate the facility’s wet-bench electroplating processes, with flexibility to easily add related downstream processes.
“i3 has selected CopperMax™ for several excellent reasons,” said ClassOne CEO Byron Exarcos. “Our proprietary CopperMax™ cation exchange membrane technology is simply unrivaled in this market. The plating chamber has been designed to dramatically reduce consumables cost while maintaining extremely high levels of feature quality—even for challenging deposition processes such as TSV. CopperMax customers routinely see reductions in additive consumables cost approaching 95%. What’s more, our Solstice platform is engineered for easy expansion, and is designed to support multiple independent processes simultaneously. It’s a perfect fit for facilities that want to grow beyond wet bench work.”
The Solstice S8 CopperMax platform can be configured with from 2 to 8 entirely independent, field-retrofittable process chambers. CopperMax™ also supports multiple wafer sizes simultaneously, allowing i3 to easily migrate from 4- to 6-inch wafers as their production requirements change. i3 will be working with ClassOne to add Solvent and UBM processing chambers to the same CopperMax™ tool in the coming months.
“CopperMax is a perfect fit for our needs,” said Neal Driver, VP-General Manager of i3 Microsystems. “The tool is incredibly flexible and will grow with us as we expand our production environment. We have also been impressed by ClassOne’s outstanding commitment to helping us develop and perfect our deposition processes. They’ve made a serious corporate commitment to customer service, and it shows.”
i3 is a highly-secure, vertically-integrated semiconductor supplier to the defense and aerospace industries. With Solstice® platforms now in production at several of the world’s foremost defense contractors, ClassOne has emerged as the supplier of choice for the exacting requirements of the defense and aerospace industries.