Austrians set sites on States: SEZ America opens Phoenix R&D lab

Electronic News, May 6, 2002 by Jeff Chappell

Austrian toolmaker SEZ AG is seeking to position itself as a complete provider of wafer cleaning and surface preparation applications and to further penetrate the U.S. semiconductor market.

Along those lines, the company's domestic subsidiary, SEZ America Inc., opened an R&D and test lab last week at its Phoenix headquarters, doubling the company's overall capacity for customer demos and research. The 3,000-square-foot lab is dedicated primarily to testing 300mm wafer-cleaning processes, but the spin processors and metrology tools are capable of working with smaller wafer sizes and compound wafers as well, explained Zach Hatcher, process manager for the new facility.

SEZ, which saw its revenue grow 28 percent in 2001, wants to move its R&D capability beyond Austria. "The United States continues to grow for the company," said Ernst Gaulhofer, referring to the domestic market. Gaulhofer is chief process applications officer and a SEZ board member. SEZ's board determined that America was currently the most strategic market for the company's new R&D facility, Gaulhofer said.

"It's not a move out but a diversification and spreading out of resources," explained Mike West, VP of strategic business development for SEZ America. In the U.S. market, for example, back-end-of-line polymer removal is a growing issue in the fabs, he added. Additionally, SEZ is planning 300mm R&D labs for Austria and Japan, according to Gaulhofer.

SEZ also announced that it would complement its single-wafer tools by adding 300mm wet bench capability to its product portfolio in the coming months, following its acquisition of wet bench manufacturer HMReinraum-Technik Ltd. (HMR) earlier this year.

At first glance, the move looks counterintuitive. In both thermal and wafer cleaning applications, single-wafer tools have become more prevalent, and proponents expect single-wafer processing to be a commonplace approach for 300mm tool platforms.

"You have fabs that are saying, 'I have single wafer everywhere else in the fab, how come I don't have single wafer in my clean?'" said Dean Freeman, an equipment analyst with Gartner Dataquest San Jose.

In fact, last year SEZ single-wafer tools led the market in spray surface preparation tools, which are typically single-wafer platforms. SEZ captured 29.8 percent of that $398.6 million market in 2001, followed closely by Semitool Inc. with 28.8 percent of the market, according to Gartner Dataquest. It was Semitool that first introduced spray processors for wafer surface preparation with a 200mm-wafer platform and now offers both single-wafer and batch tools, Freeman noted.

While spray processors as a market declined less than auto wet stations, or wet benches, in 2001, auto wet stations are still by far the larger market at $1.039 billion last year. With the HMR acquisition, SEZ has a mere 2.2 percent of that market. Japanese OEM Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co. Ltd. held a solid lead on the wet bench market last year with 34.6 percent of the market, followed by Leawood, Kan.-based SCP Global Technologies with 16 percent.

SEZ said it sees the migration to 300mm wafers as a chance to capture more of that market, and doesn't see the market for wet batch processes going away. For certain high-volume applications, batch processes will still be the process method of choice, SEZ said.

As always, the arguments of batch vs. single wafer come down to cost of ownership, Freeman explained, and it will be cost of ownership that will likely keep both platforms around for the foreseeable future. Single wafer platforms use fewer chemicals and are conducive to chemical reclaim and recycling. With multiple process chambers and chambers that can accommodate multiple processes, the throughput of single wafer tools can prove effective for certain applications.