CEO interview: Ink jet printing for semiconductor equipment
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Nick Flaherty talks to Patrick Heisler and Patrick Galliker at Scrona as it raises €4m for its third generation ink jet print heads for semiconductor equipment
Swiss startup Scrona has raised €4m as it launches its third generation ink jet print head to scale up semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Patrick Heisler joined as CEO last month having worked on packaging technology at TUM Munich and UC Berkeley and joining from FrontierLIght Technologies and Suss MikroOptics. Former CEO Patrick Galliker takes on the CTO role.
“I am very happy about that development to focus on the technology,” Galliker tells eeNews Europe.
The company has also raised €4m in a bridge round to scale up its third generation MEMS-based technology for semiconductor equipment for microLED displays and chiplet substrates. “We are aiming to replace 22 steps in semiconductor manufacturing and packaging with two steps,” said Heisler.
The Gen 3 print head currently has 8 nozzles available that can scale up to 256 in a similar form factor.
“It’s a real product and we are shipping it out to customers right now. All the inlets and outlets are made for commercial use. Gen 1 and 2 were R&D tools, they required a lot of manual work. Gen3 with 8 nozzles will be on the open market by the end of Q3 in a 7 x 7mm print head and this is not fully optimised,” said Heisler. “It’s the electrical contacts that use the most space and we have a robotic system that will be used for the contacts so the precision will increase to reduce the pitch with a 1um resolution.”
The company is aiming for a version with 128 nozzles in Q1 2025. “We have not decided on the configuration of the 128 design because it could be a matrix,” said Heisler.
The Gen 3 is a scalable platform with the same injection moulded packaging and the same electronics for the MEMS inkjet printhead die. The driver that is giving the 128 signals is sitting in the print head and use the same electronics to feed an 8 or a 128 so its possible to start with an 8 nozzle version and move to 128 or even a 256 nozzles in the same package, says Galliker.
“We are not trying to dictate anything in the process,” he said. The nozzle count can be scaled but there is a limitation on the channel count and the drivers. We have techniques to scale the nozzles without scaling the connections. We want to keep Gen 3 attractive [in cost] but it is not limited in the nozzle count,” he added. “If we see requirements for more nozzles, or higher throughputs and voltages we will move to Gen 4.”
This would see up to 1000 nozzles in a print head. “We are not going to push Gen4 just to have it out there. We want to drive Gen 3 as far as possible,” said Heisler.
“The main application are displays and advanced packaging in Taiwan, Korea, the US and Europe,” said Galliker. “We are seeing the advanced backend applications that are employing front end solutions that are too costly or too wasteful for redistribution layers (RDLs) or 3D interconnects.”
“We are moving away from the capex model with full utilisation to an opex driven model that can be lower volumes and more custom with CoWoS,” he says.
“As things develop we see Gen 3 as the main platform. Inkjet is very good at scaling. You need a printhead with many nozzles and many nozzles working together. We have been talking with one of the big semiconductor equipment makers, they are looking at the multiple print heads, an our main objective is to have many nozzles on the print head.”
“We can scale up Gen3-8 to 48 nozzles in the same MEMS die in three staggered lines of 16, with the same design, manufacturing, to the wafer, to the packaging and testing. With 8 channels as you might not need access to every nozzles, so we might scale to thousands of nozzles,” he said.
The MEMS chip is built on an in house 2in wafer where the company can design, manufacture and test a new print head chip in a week.
The company is also working on a print engine that can be completely controlled by any equipment, not just initial partner Notion.
“This is not a plug and play replacement and if it requires an adapter but we are happy to do that or a custom form factor we can do that,” said Heisler. “This is the economies of scale of semiconductor manufacturing with the mix and match on a wafer. We have easily the capacity for 100,000 print heads per year out of the fab for the big versions we have and it’s a scalable process, for the 3-8 the capacity is probably a million units,” he said.
Scrona’s proprietary technology is based on the electrostatic ejection principle which provides very fine, submicron-scale printing and jetting, while allowing the adoption of various ink materials—such as metals, dielectrics, organic, and biomaterials. The MEMS printheads allow for high nozzle density and customisation to accommodate application requirements across many industry verticals.
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