Although most of the semiconductor industries’ greatest discoveries and inventions are the results of years of research and development at prestigious universities and research institutes, some of the best solutions out there were developed in the trenches, on the manufacturing floor. Out of these ideas, entire companies have emerged, and have become successful purely by trial and error. In this Roadshow, we visited two companies who took a grass roots approach to success.
Jeff Fugere, president, DL Technologies, describes his company’s approach to product development as brown-bag engineering; they draw their ideas, bring them to the lab, and try them out. The company builds dispense pumps and tips for semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Fugere’s vision: “If we could manufacture the right pump, we would be able to sell to all the (equipment) manufacturers,” he explained. And that’s pretty much what he’s done.
HCD sprung up from a seed idea at Cornell University in 2000 with the intention of serving the land grid array (LGA) package market. Charlie Stevenson, chief operating officer (COO), and his team had a clear idea of the product they wanted to create: a high-connection-density chip- or package-level interconnect device. If existing tools weren’t good enough, they designed and built their own. Today, HCD makes test and production sockets, solderless PCB-to-PCB interconnects for medical and ATE markets, and LGA sockets.
DL Technologies, Haverhill, MA
This dispense tip can be made to the customer’s gauge of choice, beginning at 27. They are machined rather than rolled, for a smooth interior. |
Rick Massero demonstrates how auger pump housings are machined. |
Each machine has 20 tools that are interchanged automatically. All the housings are run through each step concurrently. |
Fully assembled housings are ready to ship to a customer. |
Fugere displays the completed auger dispense pump, designed to customer specifications. |
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HCD, Sunnyvale, CA
A long, narrow oven is used to cure the jacket material which is coating the braided wire SuperButton cable. |
Springs and Buttons are inserted into an FR4 carrier substrate and laminated into place. |
Courtemanche performs some optical inspection, checking out a SuperSpring version interposer in detail. |
Final electrical test station for finished interposers before shipping. |
This Instron is used for various validation and mechanical life testing of the SuperButton and SuperSpring interposers. |