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From the Editor:
Heraeus Celebrates Success with Open House
December 31, 1969 |
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Recently, Heraeus Incorporated, Contact Materials Division (CMD), of Conshohocken, Pa., conducted an open house to celebrate the million-dollar renovation and reorganization of their facility. They had a lot to celebrate: 40 years of manufacturing in North America; the most profitable year ever in 2007; expansion globally; ISO 2001:2000 certification; Sony Green Partner certification; reorganization centered on a quality control plan; diversification of customer base that includes a stable automotive concentration as well as a semiconductor materials focus; a capable research- and applications-oriented workforce; and an effective organized production environment. Let's just say that they were well prepared for success.
The company was created more than 150 years ago by Wilhelm Heraeus, a pharmacist who discovered and commercialized the industrial refining process for platinum. Since then, the company has grown to 11 billion euros in revenue, with 11,000 employees worldwide. The Conshohocken portion is part of their Contact Materials Division. This site takes up 80,000 sq.ft. with 3,000 of those in the assembly materials manufacturing facility, 2,000 in the applications lab, and the rest used by other business-related areas.
"We are here to celebrate upgrading our technology side," says Ferdinand Bartels, VP, global business unit manager. "We are expanding our business in the U.S. and globally," he adds. The company can afford the luxury of taking a long-term strategy. "We believe in U.S. industry," he adds. It's too bad he isn't running for U.S. election, I thought.
Paul Niemczura, CMD manager of technology development, talked of innovative products that they invent or improve through partnered development. Partners help move engineers into new growth areas. Some of these are bonding wire, adhesives, solder paste, solder spheres, and tacky flux. Niemczura gave examples from those used to create BGAs successfully. Because of increasing complexity, challenges create areas of opportunity challenges include oxidation of substrate metallization, coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) differences between wafer silicon and substrate, yield loss at ball attach step, and multiple thermal processes. By using a tacky flux and small particle size, the company was able to introduce BD41, a dippable solder paste. A dippable no-clean paste (BD72) also is being used for selective BGA placement and rework.
The recent consolidation of production at CMD was based on a design that focused on efficiency, material and product flow, ergonomics, and future growth plans. All materials are near the site where needed. From each process step, materials are tracked, tested, sealed, and organized carefully with barcodes for identification and RF traceability.
"The way that we know that lead-free is gaining in the marketplace is because the percentage of paste we make in a lead-free format is increasing," says Mike Skrzat, quality manager.
Every challenge thrown at Heraeus CMD represented itself as a new opportunity for making a different product. What a refreshing approach to new product introduction. It was a great day to visit Conshohocken. Now if I could just spell it from memory.
Gail Flower, editor-in-chief