Product Initiatives

In addition to equipment performance and cost competitiveness, environmental friendliness is also an important value criterion, especially in the semiconductor industry. To meet these needs, for the ENTRON^TM-EX W300 multi-chamber sputtering system, ULVAC reconfigured the main body of the system and surrounding control racks to achieve a smaller footprint (area of the system) and reduce the number of cables used. The smaller footprint corresponds to the environmental friendliness element of "space-saving, compact, lightweight, and simplified." A 40% reduction in the space required for the racks was achieved by reducing the number of racks through the use of common parts and reduction of the sizes of parts mounted on multiple racks. At the same time, as a result of a review and reconfiguration of the power supply system, the number of cables was reduced by 40%. This corresponds to the environmental friendliness element of "reduced parts count." These improvements will lead to resource saving, reduced CO₂ emissions during manufacturing, and reduced assembly man-hours.

High reliability and cost performance are important for DC power supply built into deposition equipment, etc. In addition, environmental considerations have become increasingly important in recent years.
The DC-30-44H-E, a high-capacity DC power supply used in sputtering equipment for large LCDs, has been redesigned to meet these requirements.
Internal circuitry and communication standards have been revised to enable higher functionality and reduced wiring, resulting in a product that is more than 10% smaller and 15% lighter than its predecessor.
It also meets the environmental considerations of "reducing the number of parts" and "structure that is easy to assemble and disassemble.

IGZO, which is expected to be applied in a variety of fields, is a material consisting of oxides of indium (In), gallium (Ga), and zinc (Zn). We primarily manufacture IGZO targets for sputtering equipment. Indium and gallium are especially uncommon and are considered rare metals. In order to minimize the use of limited resources, we are working to reduce the amount of raw materials used in the production of IGZO targets.
This meets our environmentally friendly criteria of "active use of reused or recycled parts" and "designed for recycling," and it also reduces the environmental burden associated with refining.

uGmni-200 is a film deposition system combining several different process modules for sputtering, etching, ashing, and CVD on the same transfer core based on the concept of the use of common parts. As a result of improvement of assembly navigation and layout optimization, the time required for equipment assembly was reduced by over 10% compared with the case of conventional equipment. In future development, we aim to reduce both the footprint and the number of parts. In addition to environmental friendliness, we will promote value engineering (VE) to develop of high-value-added products that facilitate introduction by customers.

The SMD series boasts a high market share in sputtering equipment for FPDs and is constantly evolving.
Among these, our 8th generation SMD-2500 single-substrate sputtering system has been developed with an emphasis on environmental efficiency. The new maintenance tools we adopted have optimized work efficiency, achieved a 20% reduction in maintenance time, and contributed to reductions in maintenance costs and energy consumption during non-operating periods. Furthermore, our new sputter cathode concept reduces the replacement frequency of maintenance parts by one-third and also contributes to the reduction of chemicals and water used for washing replacement parts as well as the energy used for transporting replacement parts.