Raleigh Coatings to Build Third Cleanroom

Raleigh Coatings, a UK specialist in solvent and aqueous-based adhesives and coatings, is building a silicon-gel cleanroom coating production line, its third, which will more than double its cleanroom production capacity.

The ISO Class 7 cleanroom will form part of new 35,000 sq. ft. manufacturing and warehousing premises at Eccleshall in Staffordshire.

At the same time, the firm is looking to create skilled jobs at its production facility following a record year for sales and turnover.

Since being established in 1989, the firm has seen sustained growth in demand for its contract coating services, particularly in the medical and specialist markets, and expansion into international markets, which has led to an increase in annual turnover to more than £5m.

“This sustained growth, investment and expansion means we will shortly be creating a number of highly skilled production roles within our new and existing cleanroom production lines,” said Raleigh’s general manager Peter Turton.

Raleigh’s specialist coating services include the cleanroom facility and a full design and bespoke development service. The company claims to be one of the few organizations in the UK to have a specialist ‘pilot line’ facility, which enables customers to undertake small runs and ‘test’ coatings for new or improved products in production conditions but at a fraction of the cost and with quicker turnaround times, prior to moving to full production.

Julian Watkins, Raleigh’s business development manager, said 2012 is proving to be a significant year for the company.

“We have successfully retained customers and sustained production levels to see a record year for output in the UK and overseas,” he said.

“Raleigh is committed to maintaining its edge in the specialist coating arena, through investment in plant and staff. Commissioning of the new line should be complete by the end of this year, and we anticipate recruiting for a number of new highly skilled roles to maximize our output levels and meet demand.”

Raleigh works extensively in the field of medical adhesive coating and is a specialist in pharmaceutical and medical adhesives, as well as offering a lab-bench to final production service for silicone gel, aqueous and solvent based coatings.

In addition, Raleigh operates in the specialist label, security and aerospace sectors, with UK and global customers, and supplies single and double adhesive-coated products for the automotive, building, electronics and graphics industries, in small- to large-scale runs.

Additional services include contract coating, for single, double and self-wound systems using a wide variety of adhesives, substrates and liners, slitting and converting services, and silicone gel coating services provided to a number of Blue Chip medical organizations.

Brolis Semiconductors to Open New Facility

Brolis Semiconductors Ltd of Vilnius, Lithuania is to launch a new facility on 5 December 2012. Established by brothers Augustinas Vizbaras, Kristijonas Vizbaras and Dominykas Vizbaras in 2011, the firm specializes in mid-infrared type-I GaSb laser diodes and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), manufacturing epitaxial wafers for antimonide and arsenide materials for thermal imaging focal plane arrays, CPV and custom devices.

Featuring a state-of-the-art Class 1000/10000 (ISO Class 6 & 7) cleanroom with dedicated facilities for MBE and optoelectronic device testing and packaging, the facility was completed in less than nine months, accelerated by investments from the Venture Capital fund LitCapital and European Union structural grants.

“Our goal was to launch the facility as fast as possible, so that we do not lose the momentum, both technological and competitive. Today, I believe we are pretty much on schedule with the opening. Our second milestone is to deliver first R&D laser diode products by February, 2013,” said Dominykas Vizbaras, CEO of Brolis Semiconductors.

Brolis Semiconductors’ first laser products will be 2090 nm, 2330 nm, 2730 nm, 3300 nm, and 3400 nm. “Some of these wavelengths will also be high power products,” added the firm’s chief operating officer, Augustinas Vizbaras.

NI Invests in New Penang Facility

The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) in June forecast a growth of merely 0.4 per cent in 2012 worldwide revenue and hoped for a 7.2 per cent growth in 2013. And while several electronics companies are downsizing this year, National Instruments (NI) appears to be betting on the long term at least in this region.

Discussing the setting up of new facilities in Penang, Malaysia, Chandran Nair, managing director for Southeast Asia at NI, said that this is part of the company's worldwide expansion. Penang will see the set-up of an R&D hub and a manufacturing center.

"The manufacturing center does not replace any existing operation—it is an expansion," Nair stressed. The significance of this information doesn't go unappreciated in the backdrop of electioneering in the United States, NI's home country.

Nair added that the company chose Penang for its infrastructure and good availability of people. Labor cost was not an issue for NI because the cost of labor is less than three per cent of their overall cost. "So we weren't looking necessarily for the lowest cost location but we were looking for a place where we can get good engineers both for the operational side and for the R&D center," he said.

"One of the things that are very exciting for me is the R&D growth in the emerging markets," added Victor Mieres, VP of emerging markets, who has recently moved to Singapore. "The two biggest centers are going to be Bangalore and Penang. They are working on global projects but the fact that they closer to the market, they are more aware of the market needs."

The Penang facility received about $80 million in investment over three-to-four years, according to Nair, and is expected to employ 1,500 staff, of which 400 will be R&D engineers. "We are already aggressively staffing the R&D side," informed Nair, "and we've just started staffing the manufacturing side—we expect to go live in the next few months."

The ASEAN region holds new promise for National Instruments as it works with Singapore agencies like A*Star and the universities, who are looking at using the FPGA-based CompactRIO to make their own smart grid controllers and using smart grid analyzers. Another aspect of the work is using the company's tools to simulate the grid itself because Singapore would want to take into account different kinds of generation capabilities—wind, hydro and fuel cells.

"Currently there are some companies in the world that do it, but they are closed systems and their researchers cannot add their own algorithms to into those black boxes," said Nair. "So they are looking at our tools to have more open simulation from the research side. From the implementation side, many of the large companies who are in the smart grid area, embed our tools in them," he disclosed.

EDN Asia reported earlier this month on NI's single-board inverter controller for smart grids and the company's demo of how it envisages its products to work (see NI targets smart grid with FPGA-based control systems).

NI has a global operation of about 6,000 staff. The company's Q2 2012 revenue was about $300 million and last year they hit the billion-dollar mark. Nair added that no industry is more than 15 per cent of their revenue meaning that their exposure to specific industries and risk are spread out.

Responding to a question from EE Times Asia, Nair said that Penang has both manufacturing and R&D, while Kuala Lumpur has many semiconductor companies. "At the board level, a lot of the design and manufacturing is done in Penang. Both locations have very good skillsets. But we chose Penang because many of our partners, like Intel, are in Penang. And we use a lot Intel processors for our embedded products, so there's a lot of synergy there."

The company has sales, marketing and applications engineering in both Kuala Lumpur and Penang, and, according to Nair, is fairly active in Johor.

Speaking about application opportunities, Nair said that there is a lot of growth in the wireless and communications segments, both from the telecommunications side and the consumer electronics side, then in semiconductor test and real-time test. Another area NI is focusing on is structural test for infrastructure monitoring.

On the embedded side, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) represent a large market. According to National Instruments, they address that market especially well when you have a large number of analogue and digital signals that need to be monitored and when you have very complex algorithms for the decision-making process in controls.

X-Fab Investing in MEMS

X-Fab Silicon Foundries says it will invest more than $50 million over the next three years in cleanroom space, equipment, R&D, and staff for its micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) operations, reflecting an anticipated growth in MEMS services as the company.

The move will consolidate all the company's MEMS business and activities, rebranded as X-Fab MEMS Foundry, on the company's campus in Erfurt, Germany. It's the "next step towards our goal of becoming one of the top three worldwide suppliers of MEMS foundry services," according to CEO Rudi De Winter. [X-Fab placed 10th in Yole Développement's 2011 MEMS foundry rankings, surging 33 percent to roughly $16 million in revenues, about $31M shy of No.3 Silex Microsystems -- but only $8M away from fifth-place IMT.]

"The MEMS sector is a strategic field of X-FAB’s overall activities to serve the growing needs of our customers," De Winter noted in a statement. "Our customers will benefit from the dedicated resources and expertise of a foundry focused solely on advanced MEMS technology, and built on X-FAB’s solid foundation of technical excellence."

Among X-Fab's company's recent MEMS accomplishments:

The first open-platform MEMS 3D inertial sensor process available directly from a high-volume pure-play foundry.

Completion of a dedicated noble metal facility for MEMS.

Produced MicroGen Systems' first MEMS energy harvesters.

200mm MEMS capabilities.

High-volume manufacturing of bulk and surface micromachined technologies, with and without CMOS integration.

In-house technology platforms for mainstream MEMS applications such as pressure sensors, inertial sensors and infrared sensors; and

Ready-to-use IP design blocks for MEMS accelerometers.

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