The machine

Now it’s ready: Our machine for large-scale man­u­fac­tur­ing of car­bon nanofibers. You can read about this in a press release. But a press release says only so much. There is much more to say about “the machine,” as we call it. So buck­le up, let’s talk about it.

It’s an oven

First, you may won­der what kind of machine we are talk­ing about.

If you ask our researchers and devel­op­ers, it is a sys­tem con­sist­ing of a PECVD reac­tor cham­ber and tools for high-vol­ume production.

PECVD stands for Plas­ma Enhanced Chem­i­cal Vapor Depo­si­tion. The tools include a load­ing device, vac­u­um pumps, cab­i­nets for gas­es, and a con­trol module.

If you ask me, I would describe it as an oven for high-vol­ume “bak­ing” of car­bon nanofibers on wafers and oth­er sub­strates. (Wafers are sil­i­con discs processed in sev­er­al steps to cre­ate inte­grat­ed cir­cuits, com­mon­ly known as chips.)

It’s a beast

The machine con­sists of sev­er­al parts:

The reac­tion cham­ber is where the mag­ic hap­pens. It has valves to let a gaseous car­bon com­pound in and out of the cham­ber. It has an elec­trode in the ceil­ing that cre­ates plas­ma – free-float­ing elec­trons – that caus­es the gas to release the car­bon atoms that build our car­bon nanofibers. And it has a heat­ing plate on which pre­pared wafers are placed.

The load­ing device puts the wafer into the reac­tion cham­ber and takes it out when fin­ished. Load­ing is done auto­mat­i­cal­ly from a car­tridge that holds 25 wafers. We use 8‑inch diam­e­ter wafers. This is the most com­mon size in the industry.

The vac­u­um pumps evac­u­ate the cham­ber of air so that we can con­trol the process con­di­tions and the sam­ples are not con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by unwant­ed substances.

The gas cab­i­nets are need­ed to store the gas­es going in and out of the reac­tion chamber.

The con­trol mod­ule, the cher­ry on the cake, mon­i­tors and con­trols the whole process.

Alto­geth­er, the parts take up a floor space of more than 4.5 × 2 meters and weights more than 3.6 tons and. It’s a beast.

It’s a beauty

The reac­tor cham­ber is designed in close col­lab­o­ra­tion between the man­u­fac­tur­er and us, and it is cus­tom-built to meet our specifications.

It con­tains sev­er­al inno­v­a­tive tech­ni­cal solu­tions. Many things have been con­sid­ered: mate­r­i­al selec­tion, mechan­i­cal design, com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with our patent-pro­tect­ed process, and more. And the con­trol mod­ule soft­ware is spe­cial­ly designed for our machine.

So, it is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the machine is the only one of its kind. It is tru­ly unique. It’s a beauty.

Long wait

It took a year and half to build this machine. We knew it would take a long time for the machine to be fin­ished when we placed the order in March 2022.

We antic­i­pat­ed that the man­u­fac­tur­er would have to make some tin­ker­ing here and there. It’s nat­ur­al; you rarely get it one hun­dred per­cent right the first time you do some­thing so com­plex. And one hun­dred per­cent right is what we demand. We can’t com­pro­mise on qual­i­ty. So, it took a few iter­a­tions to meet our high standards.

The man­u­fac­tur­er, CVD Equip­ment Cor­po­ra­tion in the US, is very pro­fes­sion­al and has done an out­stand­ing job. We are delight­ed with the car­bon nanofibers grown dur­ing the accep­tance test.

What remains to be done

Now, all that remains is to get the machine delivered.

But first, all parts must be CE marked, which means that the man­u­fac­tur­er declares that the parts com­ply with rel­e­vant EU leg­is­la­tion and can be brought into the Euro­pean Eco­nom­ic Area (EEA). This work is ongo­ing at the time of writing.

After that, the machine has to be packed and shipped. It sounds more straight­for­ward than it is. A cus­tom-built machine requires cus­tom pack­ag­ing and spe­cial ship­ping. It isn’t an ordi­nary piece of equip­ment we have bought.

If every­thing goes as planned, the machine will be shipped around the turn of the year.

Where it will be located

We plan to place the machine at a foundry we choose to work with. But we have not yet decid­ed which one. So, for now, it will be stored at Chalmers Uni­ver­si­ty of Technology.

Why not set it up at Chalmers, where our old­er machines are already locat­ed, or anoth­er tem­po­rary loca­tion while wait­ing for the right part­ners to be chosen?

We have con­sid­ered that but con­clud­ed that it is bet­ter to await the choice of a partner.

Remem­ber, it’s a beast. It takes up a lot of space. Requires a lot of ener­gy. And above all, it has to be in a clean room. There are no suit­able places avail­able for tem­po­rary use. We would have to pay for exten­sive rebuild­ing and instal­la­tion work. Mon­ey that could be put to bet­ter use.

How it will be used

Once in place, the machine will be part of man­u­fac­tur­ing CNF-MIM capac­i­tors. 

The through­put is one wafer each half hour. Each wafer con­tains 48,000 CNF-MIM capac­i­tors. We plan to process 500 wafers per month. That’s 24 mil­lion capac­i­tors per month. And that’s just the begin­ning. The machine can be built out to pro­duce 10X more wafers, that is, 5,000 wafers per month.

We can­not do that vol­ume with our cur­rent machine, which can pro­duce far few­er capac­i­tors per wafer, takes four times as long, and must be oper­at­ed man­u­al­ly. The new machine is sim­ply nec­es­sary for high-vol­ume pro­duc­tion of CNF-MIM capacitors.

The new machine is also scal­able. We can expand it with sev­er­al par­al­lel reac­tion cham­bers to mul­ti­ply the volume.

I lied to you

By the way, I lied to you at the beginning.

We don’t call it “the machine.” We call it “the high-vol­ume machine,” or HVM for short. But it doesn’t sound as good as “the machine,” so I gave myself an artis­tic license to short­en the name. Sor­ry. Now, over to you. Head over to LinkedIn and tell us what more you would like to know about “the machine.”