High-volume production of capacitors

When writ­ing press releas­es, words are weighed on a gold­en scale. A lot of infor­ma­tion has to be squeezed into a small space. As a pub­lic com­pa­ny, weigh­ing the words to min­i­mize the risk of mis­un­der­stand­ings is even more crit­i­cal. This is how it should be. As a share­hold­er or investor, you expect no less.

But there are two sides to every coin.

The dis­ad­van­tage of these infor­ma­tion dense press releas­es is that the big pic­ture may be lost. It’s easy to miss the for­est for the trees.

There­fore, from time to time, we will pick up recent­ly pub­lished press releas­es in this blog and unpack their implications.

Let’s start with “Smoltek has devel­oped a process for pro­duc­tion of engi­neer­ing sam­ples in high vol­umes which are expect­ed to be avail­able before the end of Q4 2023”.

Five news in one press release

If you read the press release care­ful­ly, you will find five news items:

1. Smoltek is prepar­ing for high-vol­ume pro­duc­tion of engi­neer­ing sam­ples of MIM-CNF capacitors.
2. Smoltek has devel­oped and imple­ment­ed a process to pro­duce engi­neer­ing sam­ples on a large scale.
3. The process uses 8‑inch wafers and most­ly stan­dard tools.
4. The process has been val­i­dat­ed and found to work as intended.
5. It remains to test the elec­tri­cal prop­er­ties before the pro­duc­tion of engi­neer­ing sam­ples can start.

We will go through each of these news items and dis­cuss their sig­nif­i­cance. Let’s begin.

1. High-volume production of engineering samples

Our busi­ness divi­sion for the semi­con­duc­tor indus­try, Smoltek Semi, has for some time had a strong focus on com­mer­cial­iz­ing its capac­i­tor that use car­bon nanofibers to deliv­er unmatched capac­i­tance per unit area and unit height. We call them CNF-MIM capac­i­tors because they use car­bon nanofibers (CNF) to cre­ate high­ly tight-packed met­al-insu­la­tion-met­al (MIM) capacitors.

The road from the first capac­i­tor to mass pro­duc­tion is long, but we are approach­ing the goal as planned. We are now in the midst of an essen­tial step: pro­duc­ing engi­neer­ing samples.

This step is sig­nif­i­cant for two reasons.

First of all, it is nec­es­sary to offer engi­neer­ing sam­ples because the big elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies don’t buy a pig in a poke; they require sam­ples to test. Just like you test dri­ve a new car mod­el before you buy it, they want to test dri­ve new elec­tron­ic com­po­nents before using them in mass pro­duc­tion. So, it is nec­es­sary to offer engi­neer­ing sam­ples to sell.

This brings us to the sec­ond rea­son this step is sig­nif­i­cant: It enables cus­tomer inter­ac­tion. Next year, we will start sales by con­vinc­ing elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers to choose our capac­i­tor tech­nol­o­gy for their designs. If every­thing goes accord­ing to plan, we will mass-pro­duce CNF-MIM capac­i­tors before 2027.

2. Process for large scale production

We have been work­ing for some time to take the man­u­fac­ture of CNF-MIM from the lab to the indus­try. That is not a triv­ial task.

It’s one thing to pro­duce sin­gle CNF-MIM capac­i­tors in the lab and quite anoth­er to mass man­u­fac­ture them on a large scale. In the lab, we can do pret­ty much what we want. But for high-vol­ume pro­duc­tion, we must adapt the process to indus­tri­al stan­dards, use read­i­ly avail­able tools and mate­ri­als, and ensure the fastest, eas­i­est, and smoothest process possible.

We have come a long way in doing so. We have now imple­ment­ed a process with our part­ners that enables us to pro­duce high-vol­ume engi­neer­ing samples.

3. Standard tools and 8‑inch wafers

An exam­ple of adap­ta­tion we have made going from the lab to the indus­try is the intro­duc­tion of 8‑inch diam­e­ter wafers.

A wafer is a cir­cu­lar sil­i­con disc usu­al­ly used to make inte­grat­ed cir­cuits, known as chips. Wafers exist in dif­fer­ent sizes, from 2 inch­es in diam­e­ter to 12 inch­es. The choice of size is a com­pro­mise between pro­duc­ing many chips in a sin­gle batch and the risk of los­ing many chips due to man­u­fac­tur­ing errors.

We have so far worked with 4- and 6‑inch wafers. But we have adapt­ed our process to 8 inch­es, the industry’s most com­mon size in our new high-vol­ume man­u­fac­tur­ing machine. We have also rebuilt our cur­rent machine so that an 8‑inch wafer can phys­i­cal­ly fit in, even though the effec­tive area is equiv­a­lent to a 6‑inch wafer.

Anoth­er exam­ple of adap­ta­tion is that we main­ly work with tools that are com­mon­ly used in industry.

4. Validating the process

We have pro­duced a first batch of ten wafers with 27,000 capac­i­tors each. That is more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion capacitors.

The man­u­fac­tured capac­i­tors are met­al-insu­la­tion-met­al (MIM) with­out car­bon nanofiber (CNF). Thus, they are MIM capac­i­tors but not CNF-MIM capacitors.

So why did we do a batch with­out car­bon nanofibers?

Pro­duc­ing MIM capac­i­tors on semi­con­duc­tors is a high­ly com­plex task. It requires sev­er­al steps by dif­fer­ent part­ners spe­cial­ized in their respec­tive fields. We want­ed to val­i­date that our part­ners could pro­duce capac­i­tors with con­sis­tent prop­er­ties and good qual­i­ty in a sta­ble and repeat­able way. So, by elim­i­nat­ing the car­bon nanofibers from the equa­tion, we were able to val­i­date that the process steps our part­ners make meet our high stan­dards. We are delight­ed with the results.

5. Next step: CNF-MIM

We have already start­ed pro­duc­tion of a new tri­al batch that is iden­ti­cal in all respects to the first one, except that we are now adding car­bon nanofibers. We expect to fin­ish this sec­ond batch before the end of this year.

When we receive the new batch, we will togeth­er with our part­ner YAGEO test the elec­tri­cal prop­er­ties. We are ready to start pro­duc­ing and ship­ping engi­neer­ing sam­ples if they meet our high expectations.

What do you think?

Did this arti­cle  give you a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the mean­ing of the press release? Vis­it our IR page on LinkedIn and tell us what you thought of the post. The floor is yours.