OTHER ELECTRONICS & NANOTECHNOLOGY
INDUSTRY UPDATE
November 2016
McIlvaine Company
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
DeZURIK has constructed a New Dedicated Cleanroom
POET Technologies to Expand R&D in Singapore
Foxconn to Expand its Operations in India
Physical Sciences Imaging Centre, Oxfordshire, U.K.
A Cleanroom for Making Sensors
Meeting the highest standards for special valve cleaning and
packaging services is of paramount importance for industry-leading valve
manufacturer DeZURIK. In order to ensure
proper cleaning procedures are performed on valves intended for oxygen, ozone,
chlorine, hydrogen peroxide, isocyanate and other applications, DeZURIK has
constructed a new dedicated cleanroom within its Sartell manufacturing plant.
Operated by trained cleaning technicians, DeZURIK's cleanroom
is constructed with positive pressure ventilation to limit environmental
contamination and airborne particles. The facility maintains all separate tools,
benches and equipment to reduce the potential for cross contamination. Cleaning
procedures include mechanical, ultrasonic and/or solvent cleaning methods, with
each part inspected under both white light and UV Black Light to identify any
contaminants.
DeZURIK's cleaning services adhere to industry standards and
individual customer specifications. Following are some of the industry standard
specifications that DeZURIK can meet:
Oxygen Service (per MSS-SP-138)
Ozone Service (per CGA 4.1)
Chlorine Service (per Chlorine Institute
Pamphlet 6)
Silicone Free Service (per MSS-SP-140)
Hydrogen Peroxide Service (per MSS-SP-150)
Isocyanate Service (certified to your
requirements)
Phos-Chem Service (certified to your
requirements)
Other Services: (contact DeZURIK with exact
specifications)
After each valve is thoroughly cleaned and re-assembled, it is
given a second seat and shell test to ensure sealing capability is maintained.
Once inspected, all cleaned DeZURIK valves are carefully labeled and specially
sealed to protect the cleaned valve during shipment and storage.
DeZURIK invites customers who have special cleaning
requirements to visit the Sartell Clean Room for review and approval of the
procedures, cleaning and testing used on their valve order. To schedule a visit,
or to receive for more information about DeZURIK's clean room services, please
contact your local representative or one of DeZURIK's application engineers at
the company's corporate headquarters in Sartell, MN.
POET Technologies, a developer of opto-electronics processes,
has entered into an agreement with the Singapore Economic Development Board
(EDB) to expand POET's R&D operations in Singapore.
POET will establish an Integrated Photonics Centre within its
current operations to further develop and commercialize differentiated photonics
and opto-electronic products. This is expected to increase market penetration
and enhance market acceptance of the POET portfolio as it is introduced.
Under the agreement, POET is eligible to receive support up to
a maximum of 10,699,000 Singapore dollars (around $7.7 million) over five years
pursuant to the EDB letter of offer, subject to headcount and expenditure
thresholds.
The Singapore operations will further the development and
production of POET's key technologies, including those developed with the joint
program POET established with the Institute of Materials Research and
Engineering (IMRE) in Singapore earlier this year. The planned initiatives are
expected to gradually add up to 30 engineers and scientists to POET, as the R&D
center is established.
"EDB's support will be instrumental in helping us drive the
growth of intellectual property, talent and operations in Singapore, thus
providing a foundation for compound semiconductor and photonics growth in the
region", said Chairman Ajit Manocha.
He added: "I have been engaged with Singapore for much of my
career and value the nurturing and enduring partnerships with the EDB
throughout. We chose Singapore because of EDB's initiative to grow the compound
semiconductor and photonics ecosystem in the region, and we are thankful to the
EDB for supporting our Integrated Photonics Centre of Excellence in Singapore.
The country's business-friendly climate and support from government agencies
truly set it apart. We look forward to continuing to work with the EDB as we
accelerate the commercialization of our highly differentiated technologies
serving a variety of applications and markets."
"This support from the EDB could potentially allow POET and
its subsidiaries, DenseLight and BB Photonics, to accelerate product and revenue
growth by leveraging Singapore's R&D efficiencies, infrastructure, learning
institutions and human capital and its strong high-technology manufacturing
base", said CEO Suresh Venkatesan.
"Current projects in Singapore include the research and
development of the POET Platform for Display applications, as well as the
commercialization of POET, DenseLight and BB Photonics Intellectual Property in
the fast growing Data Communications and Sensing markets."
"EDB is committed to developing the compound semiconductor
industry through partnerships with companies to perform critical R&D and
manufacturing in Singapore. Innovations in compound semiconductor technology can
enable the next generation of optical communication solutions needed for
increasing requirements in datacenters. We are delighted to partner with POET
Technologies to lead DenseLight, a company with a strong Singapore core of
talent and activities, to greater heights", said Pee Beng Kong, director for
electronics, EDB.
Foxconn Electronics plans to expand significantly its
operations in India in 2017, with projects including building a new production
for production of iPhone devices, restoring a number of old plants and
establishing new business outlets, according to a Chinese-language
Economic Daily News (EDN) report.
Foxconn plans to build an assembly plant to produce iPhone
devices scheduled to start volume production in the fourth quarter of 2017, said
the report. However, Foxconn declined to comment on the report, EDN said.
Foxconn also plans to revamp the old production facilities of
Nokia and Sharp in Chennai. The restored production facilities will have a
combined production capacity of 100 million units of mobile devices a year, said
the report.
The company also rented an established factory in Navi Mumbai
recently and will begin trial production in August, the report added.
Overall, Foxconn will invest up US$5 billion to set up 10-12
production sites in India by 2020, said the paper.
Industry, press and leading scientists have gathered for the
opening of a pioneering new center for the study of nanoscale materials located
at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire. The launch of this unique center is set
to boost the U.K.’s world-leading science and technology infrastructure.
The ePSIC center is part of a new Electron Microscope facility
co-located with a new beamline at Diamond within a dedicated 2,350 sq. ft.
building.
Oxfordshire’s cutting-edge electron Physical Sciences Imaging
Centre (ePSIC) is the result of collaboration between a research facility,
academia and industry. Diamond Light Source, the U.K.’s synchrotron, partnered
with the University of Oxford and the global specialty chemicals company,
Johnson Matthey to bring a unique set of tools to the center. Funding for the
construction of the new Diamond building housing ePSIC included contributions
from the Wellcome Trust, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council, and a Ł2 million contribution from the Science and Technology
Facilities Council.
The internationally leading center for U.K. science contains
two state-of-the-art electron microscopes for the physical sciences, designed to
provide scientists with atomic level images in a range of technologically
important materials.
This information can be used to develop enhanced ‘smart’
materials for use in consumer technology, next- generation transportation and
engineering. The advanced tools can not only give a way to visualize at atomic-
resolution scales but could also help address some of the great technology and
engineering challenges of our time.
ePSIC’s two electron microscopes will provide top of the line
resolution down to 0.5 Angstroms for research groups looking to determine the
atomic structure and characteristics of materials. Advanced tools such as this
are expensive so it is important that they become accessible in a centralized
way and thereby provide tangible benefits to the wider science community.
Academic scientists from around the world will be able to access the center’s
tools following peer review. This will ensure that ePSIC is attracting the best
science and supporting some of the most promising research projects in the
field.
The project was completed in spring 2016, the ePSIC facility
was officially opened the 5th September 2016.
Building project managers and scientific leads confer at the
site of a new cleanroom under construction at Argonne National Laboratory. When
completed, the lab will enable scientists and engineers to build extremely
sensitive detectors.
It takes a very, very cleanroom to build a detector sensitive
enough to see the light from the beginning of the universe.
Work is underway at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's)
Argonne National Laboratory on a new "cleanroom." The new lab will be specially
suited for building parts for ultra-sensitive detectors—such as those to carry
out improved X-ray research, or for the South Pole Telescope to search for light
from the early days of the universe.
"This will be a unique facility, and a wonderful investment
for the future of the laboratory," said Supratik Guha, who heads the Center for
Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility adjacent to where the
new space will be located.
Cleanrooms are a special kind of laboratory that is heavily
filtered and cleaned, so that no free-floating particles interfere with delicate
work. Take a cube of air one foot on a side: In a normal room in your house or
office, this cube contains about one million free-floating particles of dust,
dirt and other materials. In the clean room, it's no more than 100.
This environment is what you need to build detectors that can
detect the tiniest amount of energy striking the surface.
"Even a few stray specks of dust in the niobium can throw off
the design for these detectors," said Marcel Demarteau, who heads the High
Energy Physics Division at Argonne and will be a key user of the new lab.
One use for such detectors is in the South Pole Telescope in
Antarctica, one of several telescopes searching for light waves that have
traveled throughout the universe since the moments after the Big Bang. This kind
of light is called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.
Because the light has traveled across space for the 13.8
billion years since the universe began, it has encountered all sorts of
obstacles that slightly change its power spectrum—galaxy clusters, patches of
dark matter, even our own atmosphere. "We have to correct for these to map the
Cosmic Microwave Background signature we're looking for, but these small
perturbations themselves hold an enormous amount of very valuable information
about the composition of the universe," Demarteau said.
“It’s an excellent opportunity for us to push the boundaries
of what’s possible,” said Advanced Photon Source engineer Thomas Cecil of the
new clean room. Credit: Mark Lopez/Argonne National Laboratory
The most sensitive instruments today to find such signals are
detectors made from superconductors. Superconductors are extremely sensitive
materials that change properties dramatically when their temperature is raised
even a tiny bit, and scientists can build components that react to specific
frequencies to detect the signature of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The new
clean room should allow researchers to build even more sensitive detectors—think
of a camera that takes 150-pixel pictures versus one that can take 500,000-pixel
images.
The same technology will also offer researchers a chance to
get better close-ups of the atomic makeup of objects being studied at the
Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne where
scientists use X-rays to study everything from car fuel injectors to proteins
that play roles in disease.
The Advanced Photon Source sends beams of high-energy X-rays
at a sample of whatever scientists are studying: a new solar cell material, a
sample of volcanic glass from Greenland, a protein involved in photosynthesis.
The X-rays hit the sample and scatter off in all directions. Very sensitive
detectors pick up that scatter and reveal the chemical and atomic layout of the
sample. The better the detector, the more information you can get; so Advanced
Photon Source scientists are always looking for new ways to improve those
detectors.
"The type of detector we want to build, nobody makes
commercially: so we have to build our own," said Thomas Cecil, an engineer with
the Advanced Photon Source. The new clean room will allow them to experiment
with new kinds of transition edge sensors, which he said they hope could
eventually improve the sensitivity by one or even two orders of magnitude
compared to traditional silicon-based detectors.
Building such technology is an excruciatingly delicate
process, in which they lay down multiple coatings just a few nanometers
thick—less than a hundredth of the diameter of a human hair—of superconducting
materials and etch patterns into them. Then they repeat the process all over
again, for up to 15 layers.
The detector itself is so precise that it's operated at
temperatures colder than outer space to achieve maximum sensitivity. "It's an
excellent opportunity for us to push the boundaries of what's possible," Cecil
said.
Other potential uses, Demarteau said, include quantum
computing as well as homeland security: building detectors that can pick out the
particular signature of a specific kind of radiation, to detect if terrorists
are carrying a dirty bomb made out of, for example, cesium-137.
The project broke ground in May and is expected to be
completed in mid-2017.
McIlvaine Company
Northfield, IL 60093-2743
Tel:
847-784-0012; Fax:
847-784-0061
E-mail:
editor@mcilvainecompany.com
Web site:
www.mcilvainecompany.com