Tegal receives order for 200 SE Silicon DRIE process tool from leading MEMS Research Center

PETALUMA, USA: Tegal Corp., an innovator of specialized production solutions for the fabrication of advanced MEMS, power ICs and optoelectronic devices, has received an order for a Tegal 200 SE DRIE tool from a leading Asia Pacific-based Research and Development institution investigating MEMS and associated technologies.

The Tegal 200 SE DRIE tool will be shipped and installed at the customer’s site later this calendar year.

The Tegal 200 SE silicon DRIE system order is from a first-time Tegal DRIE customer, and is the result of a thorough competitive evaluation the customer performed on a broad range of silicon DRIE tools and tool suppliers, including competitive solutions from the customer’s home market.

“Our customer knows the path to technological leadership in MEMS research and development starts with choosing the right silicon DRIE tool for the work,” said Yannick Pilloux, DRIE Product Manager at Tegal. “We believe that our DRIE 200 SE system and our deep silicon etch processes are the most reliable and most advanced on the market today and, combined with the excellent local support available from Tegal, resulted in Tegal having been chosen over our competitors, including the home-market competition.”

The Tegal 200 SE is the best-adapted DRIE solution for 3D-SiP and MEMS volume manufacturing today. The tool is designed to achieve high throughput with low Cost of Ownership in production applications, thanks to the combination of extended time between cleaning, minimal wafer edge exclusion, high silicon etch rates, excellent process stability and highly uniform etching.

The 200 SE results are obtained thanks to the implementation by Tegal of a wide range of proprietary hardware and process improvements to the standard Bosch process for deep silicon etch; these improvements include the Tegal patented heated liner, and the patented S.H.A.R.P. (Super High Aspect Ratio Process) process.

Tegal silicon DRIE tools are presently employed in numerous research and development laboratories throughout the world, engaging in both commercial and academic research programs, and are also found in MEMS foundries and other dedicated commercial High Volume Manufacturing lines worldwide.