Specialty Materials Provider

Materials Formulation in Months, Not Years

The Challenge

The customer had an opportunity to win new business after its major customer suffered a failure on its post–Cu cleaning process using a competing material. But to succeed, the company had to bring its new material into production in a matter of months: this opportunity would have been lost under traditional multi-year development.

The Project

Using the Tempus™ fluids-based workflow for parallel processing, hundreds of experiments were performed with a significant amount of critical physical and electrical device data. The customer was able to present promising preliminary data on a new cleaning material in just four-to-six weeks, and perform qualification demos of a second-generation version after just six weeks. A major Taiwanese chipmaker qualified the new material at its own facilities and said it was superior to two earlier formulations just nine months after the beginning of the project.

Results

The project produced unprecedented speed in moving from materials formulation through pilot production, and as a result, this customer expects significant new revenue over the next three years. The key differentiator with Intermolecular’s High-Productivity Combinatorial™ (HPC) approach is that it quickly correlates potential formulations to electrical results, thereby decreasing the qualification time and risk. The customer is planning to apply the HPC model to other R&D projects, and sees the approach as a major competitive advantage over its rivals.

According to Broadpoint Capital’s Industry Report on Advanced Materials from March 2008, the materials provider is already seeing success from this collaboration and its implementation of Intermolecular’s workflow. “Working with one of its leading foundry customers, … was able to resolve an emerging node-cleaning issue within a quarter, which the company believes would have taken three or four quarters using traditional technologies.”