Product Enhancement and Retrofits
Capital Preservation through Product Enhancement Retrofits
All Akrion Technologies tools are engineered with capital preservation in mind. The ability to maintain and upgrade your fleet of tools today and well into the future is a core design philosophy, not an afterthought. For more than 20 years, our Product Enhancement Department has maintained specialized resources dedicated to retrofit, reconfiguration, and capital preservation activities. We enable you to retrofit your oldest tools with the latest capabilities.
Whatever your needs, customization or otherwise, Akrion Technologies engineers are committed to continuous improvement for our vast installed base of systems worldwide.
Examples of how Product Enhancement Retrofits have allowed our customers to preserve their capital investment:
Challenge : An IDM customer developed a new MEMS device, however, yield was low due to the challenge of drying buried cavities. Overall wafer numbers were too low to justify a new tool, but a new approach to the dry step was needed.
PE solution : A process module was modified to run two chemistries instead of one and the redundant module was converted into a vacuum dryer.
Benefit : The new configuration allowed for parallel processing of the original recipe and the new recipe for the time required to qualify the new recipe.
Challenge : A foundry customer needed to introduce a new chemical and process flow for a new product that was transferred from their customer. Their first reaction was to request a quote for a new tool, but that exceeded the project budget and timeline.
PE solution : Akrion Technologies proposed to modify an under-utilized module on a GAMA to run the new chemistry without affecting other processes running on that tool.
Benefit : This fit both the budget and timeline allowing the customer to ramp production on schedule.
Challenge : A foundry customer had a 20 year-old GAMA that they were happy with. The process chemical heater became obsolete and no direct replacements were available on the market.
PE solution : An upgrade package consisting of a new, fully supported heater with a controller and new wet station software was developed and implemented.
Benefit : The 20 year-old GAMA is now 25 years-old and still running customer wafers to specification.