INDUSTRY NEWS

LAST STOP: Ralph Maldonada applies a CO2 final clean at a dedicated bench in QuantumClean's flagship plant in Colorado.

Opening start-up's first plant, outsourcing veteran sees vindication and consolidation

Thinking back to what one might consider the Mesozoic era of chipmaking, Dave Zuck remembers when Motorola "had the nerve to break the paradigm." The breakthrough happened when the giant chipmaker signed the industry's first agreement giving an outside supplier the keys to gas delivery operations at one of its fabs. Then the semiconductor technical and site services manager for Air Products and Chemicals, Zuck pitched Motorola on the concept and managed the semiconductor industry's first supply-and-service contract for Motorola's MOS 6 fab in Arizona.

It was 1988, not that long ago when you think about it. But in the lickety-split world of chipmaking, epochs occur at the speed of light. "We laugh now because that fab was their first successful submicron facility," he recalls. Until Motorola's paradigm-busting decision at MOS 6, the benefits of hiring an outside company to oversee noncore manufacturing chores were not so obvious, he says. Ultimately, the fab "had better yields than any of their fabs had had previously," and uptime was better, just for starters. The success of the pioneering arrangement made it easier for Zuck and his colleagues to later pitch the merits of the idea "to MOS 11 down in Austin, TX." Today, more than 60 fabs around the world use Air Products' Megasys gas and chemical supply management services.

Overcoming entrenched attitudes was difficult at first, Zuck recalls. "They had convinced themselves that because they handled spec gases and chemicals in-house, they must be pretty good at it. This is the late '80s. In fact, people had built small empires protecting their supposed knowledge. They were looked at as gurus inside Intel and Motorola. It was a very hard sell to convince these companies that an outside company could come in and handle that gas system better."

Outsourcing has made the equivalent of several eras' worth of progress since the late 1980s, of course. And earlier this year Zuck combined his 20 years of expertise in gas and chemical management with that of 14 experienced colleagues to launch QuantumClean. Based in Dublin, PA, the start-up opened its flagship advanced cleaning facility in late July. Located in Colorado Springs, CO, the plant has 1000 sq ft Class 10 and Class 100 cleanrooms and boasts a zero-emission philosophy.

QuantumClean is trying to set itself apart from the 15 or so other companies offering similar outsource cleaning services. The company offers solid CO₂ blasting, media/bead blasting, and a new process called single-part chamber cleaning (SPCC). SPCC is a key strategic concept for the company. The start-up has filed 43 patent claims for the process, which is designed to eliminate cross-contamination between customer tool parts, reduce chemical use, and lessen the amount of waste compared with traditional cleaning methods. The SPCC process is designed to accommodate 300-mm wafers as well.

Zuck says SPCC will be used to remove chemically bound, or metal-on-metal, contaminants. Carbon dioxide and media/bead polishing blast cleaning are better suited for nonchemically bonded contaminants. Most cleaning firms are in one of two groups, says Zuck, who left his post as president and CEO of ESCA, an Albuquerque-based parts cleaner. They use either a carbon dioxide cleaning process like ESCA does or a wet chemical approach like Kachina, Chemetal, and SSI.

"We developed on a bench scale this reduced-chemical cleaning process that works, then we built it into our customer benches and built a factory around this," Zuck explains. "As a result, we can give the customer high-purity chemicals per clean because we can afford to buy semiconductor-grade purity."

Zuck claims it's difficult to make a direct correlation between parts cleaning and yield improvement. "Too many suppliers made the mistake of going into very sophisticated users saying, 'We're increasing your yields.' " That doesn't mean, though, that a case can't be made for better yields.

"If we can provide the certificate of analysis saying that the part is consistently cleaner, it takes a variable away from that yield/process equation," Zuck asserts. "If the part in fact has fewer particulates on it, the chamber will have fewer particulates as a result. And if a part is dryer and has fewer monolayers of moisture on it, it will pump down in vacuum quicker. Those things stop short of saying yield will improve. Intuitively, though, it says [the tool] ought to work better."

QuantumClean's customers will be able to track their parts and purity data from their own computers using the company's Web Traveler program. There will be no paper trail per se. The parts travel in boats "similar to how a wafer moves" and the computer keeps track of their progress. The parts-cleaning firm will capture purity data in real time and track the particulate levels to give clients a "snapshot certificate of analysis that captures all the manufacturing variables. It's archived, and you can go back to it much later," says Zuck.

Customers from semiconductor, disk, and related microelectronics manufacturing companies can ship their tool parts to QuantumClean's Colorado facility. The start-up also has plans to open five more plants spread throughout the United States, with expansion in Europe and Asia on the drawing board. Parts "shouldn't have frequent flier miles," Zuck is fond of saying.

Zuck is COO and CTO of the company. Others on the management team are Scott Nicholas, president and CEO, who has held numerous executive posts in the semiconductor industry; Jim Petterson, corporate facilities manager and former manager at Atmel Semiconductor's central cleaning operations; and Dwight Zuck, an 18-year industry veteran chemical engineer who is director of sales and marketing. The Zucks are brothers.

By mid-September the start-up expects to close a partnership deal with a major third-party investor, someone Dwight Zuck calls "a front-end service and materials provider." The company will have a minority position.

QuantumClean's start-up costs were 25 to 33% of the costs of competing cleaning firms, according to Dwight Zuck, who was on staff at ESCA for nine months. He says the market size for parts cleaning, based on the 230 or so fabs in the United States and double that number globally, falls between $1 billion and $2 billion annually. Based on a study of the 15 to 18 competing firms and his stint with ESCA, QuantumClean's marketing executive estimates that $100 million worth of parts were sent to outsource cleaners by the summer of 1999. Of that total, which represents "only 10% of the parts cleaning that could be outsourced," he says $80 million were cleaned with chemicals and $20 million with CO₂.

Both executives believe the industry is ripe for consolidation. Certainly, recent business events support that belief. In July, ATMI, a specialty materials provider based in Danbury, CT, purchased ESCA in a pooling of interests transaction valued at $17 million. In late July Pentagon Technologies of Fremont, CA, received a $30-million line of credit to support expansion plans for the company, which specializes in cleaning and reconditioning semiconductor equipment parts. The deal represents a "major investment" led by Baird Capital Partners, an equity investment firm. Baird will hold a majority ownership in Pentagon.

Established as part of MPW Services in Hebron, OH, Pentagon moved from a wholly owned MPW subsidiary to a privately held corporation. MPW and Pentagon management also have significant stakes in the company. Pentagon's acquisition drive continued in August when the company bought Chemetal, a 17-year-old vendor of cleaning and reconditioning services for front-end equipment. The acquisition is scheduled to close by the end of September. In 1999, Pentagon purchased Support Systems and Thermal Coatings.

The acquisition binge reflects industry realities, indicates Dave Zuck, who says "the landscape of parts cleaners is diminishing." He predicts what he sees as "a cottage industry" approach becoming increasingly focused on "three or four players in three to five years that will look like the Praxairs, the Olins, or the Air Products of the world."

Maintains Zuck, "It is difficult to trust a $1-billion factory to a company whose net revenues are only $5 million a year.

"We've taken a paradigm shift in this," he continues. "One of my premises is that parts cleaning had missed the ultraclean revolution in that it was done in the subfab." In other words, the parts-per-billion push by gases and chemicals providers with certificates of analysis needed on stainless-steel piping and other components "forced suppliers in the late '80s and early '90s to literally clean up their act. But I would sit in front of a process manager of a facility and ask, 'You've got your system under control?' And he'd say, 'Oh, yes, absolutely.' 'On everything that's touched the wafer? How about your tool parts? You know, the ones you're scrubbing with Scotch Brite down in the subfab?' I'd get a blank stare."

Ultimately, Zuck tells clients, "Instead of just moving your subfab problem down the street, we're eliminating it." This approach frees up space and cash in fabs where building, labor, and chemical costs can reach astronomical levels.

In pondering QuantumClean's business plan Dave Zuck looked back over his two decades of pioneering experience. "I've given a lot of thought to the history of outsourcing. In fact, the semiconductor industry remained vertically aligned much like Henry Ford's production line models back in the early 1900s. The rubber, coal, and steel go into one end, and a car comes out the other." In the 1960s and 1970s, arguably the semiconductor industry's Paleozoic era, chipmakers "made their own diffusion furnaces and clear into the '80s they were building their own wet benches and gas cabinets."

How quaint it all seems today. Nevertheless, the industry deemed it necessary, just as necessary apparently as this new trend to farm out CVD and furnace parts in order to concentrate on, go figure, making microprocessors, DRAMs, and ASICs. It's all part of what Dave Zuck calls the "ultraclean revolution."

"It's so exciting to be part of an industry that didn't exist five years ago but will be recognized as much as the Ashland Chemicals and Air Products are today," he says.

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