OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
INDUSTRY UPDATE
January 2015
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Tunghsu
Group, KSGT Invest in Color Filter Production Facilities
POSCO ENG
to Build Cleanroom for Seagate’s Thai Fab
Sensata
Technologies, U.S. Headquarters, Attleboro, Mass.
Student
Nanotechnology Laboratories Network Set Up in Iran
CERN
Constructing New Cleanroom Facility
China-based glass substrate maker Tunghsu Group has announced
it will cooperate with KSGT to further develop color filter production, with
investments estimated at roughly CNY500 million (US$80.64 million).
Tunghsu will put forth 80% of the investment while KSGT will
put up the remaining, said Tunghsu.
Market observers believe most of the supply will be offered to
China-based panel maker InfoVision Optoelectronics (IVO), which Tunghsu
cooperates with in supplying LCD substrates. IVO currently relies on a number of
suppliers from Japan and Korea, the observers added.
Tunghsu's new investment will be for new facilities in
Kunshan, China, which are expected to go into mass production as of 2016.
Approximately 35% of the company's production capacity is allocated to IVO and
that percentage is expected to increase following completion of the
construction.
At present, most upstream display materials and components
supplied to China are from makers outside China, which the local government is
trying to improve through increased subsidies to local makers to expand
production, the observers noted.
POSCO Engineering, a subsidiary of steel mill giant POSCO, won
a bid to construct a clean- room facility worth US$123 million in Thailand.
The company announced on December 22 that it received a letter
of agreement for the construction of a cleanroom from world famous hard drive
manufacturer Seagate. Its new fab will be located in Korat, Nakhon Ratchasima,
230 kilometers northeast of Bangkok.
A cleanroom is a dust-free environment found in industrial
plants used to manufacture semiconductors, including hard drive disks. Cleanroom
development requires high-end technology and construction ability.
An official at POSCO Engineering said, “By constructing
various high-tech industrial plants in and outside of Korea, such as Nokia’s
cellular phone factory in Vietnam, Seoul Semiconductor’s LED factory, Koreno’s
LCD film fab, and Amkor Technology Korea’s semiconductor fab, we obtained first
class technology and ability in the field.”
In undertaking the Thai project, the company hopes to expand
its footprint in the cleanroom construction market in Thailand and Southeast
Asia, where facilities of this type are in demand.
Sensata Technologies is a company developing mission critical
sensors and electrical protection for use in the aircraft/military, appliance,
automotive, electronics, solar, transportation, HVAC/R, industrial and
semiconductor industries. Renovations to the company’s U.S. headquarters in
Attleboro, Mass., which houses 850 employees, comprise full upgrades to the
second floor. The area was reconfigured to accommodate a new executive board
room, multiple executive suites, additional offices and cubical spaces. Existing
HVAC, electrical and fire protection systems were also updated. The renovated
second floor provides employees with a bright, open and modern space in which to
work. A neutral palette is complemented by colorful furnishings and accent
walls, and the building’s lobby features a 60-ft curtainwall that floods the
space with natural light. The lobby’s décor also pays tribute to Sensata’s
global presence through incorporation of flags representing each country in
which the company maintains a business center or manufacturing plant.
The network consists of 42 nanotechnology laboratories for the
education and training of students. The laboratories are equipped with at least
eight important laboratorial devices in the field of nanotechnology that are
made in Iran, including optical and electron microscopes (STM, SPM, and AFM),
sputtering device, electrosonic device, electrospinning, wire electrical
explosion device and so on.
The plan to establish student nanotechnology laboratories
began in 2012 and seven student laboratories were equipped with nanotechnology
devices by March 2013. In 2014, the equipment of student nanotechnology
laboratories was done faster and the establishment of 42 laboratories began.
Based on the plan, 39 nanotechnology student laboratories will start their
activities by March 2015.
A budget of $1,700,000 has been allocated to this program,
which has been provided by Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council, Ministry of
Education and Training, and the office of Vice-President for Science and
Technology.
Students of nine provinces in the country have access to
nanotechnology student laboratories, and more laboratories will start work in
other provinces by the end of this year.
ROHM is building a new facility in Thailand in response to the
increasing demand for expanding the post processing production capability of
LSIs. The project—which will rise at ROHM Integrated Systems (Thailand) Co.,
Ltd—is currently in the design phase. Construction is set to start in December
2014 and be completed by December 2015.
The ROHM Group has been working to strengthen production
capability by updating its manufacturing equipment and increasing the total
floor space at RIST by investing around $126 million to build a new 28,800m2
(309,888 sq. ft.) manufacturing facility to meet future growth. This effort is
expected to increase LSI post-processing production capacity by 1.4x.
The new facility will produce analogue power devices,
including motor driver and power management ICs, for the automotive and
industrial markets.
In addition, the new building will take advantage of the ROHM
Group's comprehensive Business Continuity Management (BCM) system by
implementing such measures as introducing LED lighting and high efficiency AC
equipment along with raising the 1st floor by 3m to guard against flooding.
The ROHM Group is also taking steps to ensure stable product
supply to customers worldwide—even during a disaster or unforeseen event—for
example by continuing to further enhance production capacity to meet market
needs, establishing a multi-site production system, optimizing inventory
management (i.e. maintaining safety stock), and making production equipment and
processes more disaster-proof.
Recently, another Japanese firm, Toshiba, set a $1 billion
investment budget for Southeast Asia, hoping to double its regional sales in the
targeted period.
The HIE-ISOLDE cleanrooms in SM18.HIE-ISOLDE is set to be the
world's leading nuclear physics site, ultimately accelerating radioactive nuclei
to an impressive 10 MeV/u. Helping the facility reach this energy are new
superconducting cryomodules, the first quarter-wave cavity module to be
assembled at CERN and necessitating a custom cleanroom in SM18.
At a towering five meters tall, the new cleanroom houses a
custom assembly frame and associated equipment, moving the components of the
6-ton cryomodules both vertically and horizontally while they are being
assembled.
"Each cryomodule is
made up of some 10,000 parts, which have come from across the continents to be
assembled here," says CERN TE engineer Lloyd Williams, who is managing quality
assurance for the project. "Each part is checked by the CERN team, catalogued
and thoroughly cleaned, before being installed in the cryomodule with
sub-millimeter precision."
While piecing together this complex puzzle is tough enough,
the team also needs to keep the module pristine during every phase of assembly.
"The cryomodules
feature a single vacuum, with no separation between the beam and insulation
vacuums," says CERN TE engineer Yann Leclercq, who is leading the cryomodule
assembly team. "This means the entire assembly zone needs to be kept as pristine
as possible, as a single speck of dust could later pollute sensitive RF cavities
and seriously affect the cavity performances. Our cleanroom has a constant flow
of filtered air, keeping the construction area spotless, and we keep
interventions in the room to a minimum to avoid any unnecessary contamination."
It's a delicate process, and one that will take the assembly
team six long months to get just right with the help and support from the Beams
and Engineering Departments. The first cryomodule should be completed and
assembled in the HIE-ISOLDE facility by mid-2015. Then it will be given to BE-RF
experts, the equipment owners, for final RF validation.
Not all cleanroom equipment is super high tech. This "tea
strainer" is used to hold small elements to be cleaned, thus reducing
contamination from gloves. Not all cleanroom equipment is super high tech. This
"tea strainer" is used to hold small elements to be cleaned, thus reducing
contamination from gloves. At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear
Research, physicists, and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the
universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments
to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The
particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The
process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and
provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.
The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle
accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high
energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary
targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.
Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the
Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and
now has 21 member states.
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