By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
Aug. 6, 2001 — Nearly two years after inspiration struck chemist David Fries in the back of a boat, he has launched a small tech business that eliminates the need for costly photomasks in making many bioMEMS and sensor devices.
A computer-controlled “smart filter” that converts
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| “This will pay for itself in photomasks. We can play in some niche markets.” Jay Sasserath, Intelligent Micro Patterning chief executive |
Intelligent Micro Patterning LLC of St. Petersburg, Fla., has begun marketing its turnkey systems through a sales agent in the United Kingdom and one in California. The system, which retails for about $100,000, includes a PC, photolithography hardware, MEMS mirror devices, a microscope and technical support.
“It’s a process improvement for MEMS,” said Beverly Haeger of Constellation Technology Corp. of Largo, Fla., which is developing a line of MEMS-based biological, chemical and nuclear sensors. The company already markets non-MEMS sensors and plans to have its small tech line on the market within a year.
“This doesn’t expand the technology horizon, but it helps make the process faster and cheaper by getting rid of the mask steps. [It’s] definitely something we’ll want to use. What they have come up with is a superior process. It makes it easier to prototype new components because it makes it easier to make modifications.”
Haeger is the former manager of engineering at a U.S. Department of Energy facility in Largo, which made components for nuclear weapons. Run by Lockheed-Martin, it was closed in 1997. She said Constellation will become a customer of Intelligent Micro Patterning’s maskless system as it ramps up from prototyping to full-scale production in the coming months.
Tom Weller is a University of South Florida researcher in radio frequency (RF), or wireless, MEMS who has used Intelligent Micro Patterning’s system “in trying to integrate RF telemetry with microfluidics. … With this technique, we can save easily a week’s time, not having to design masks, then send them to the shop to be made, then waiting for them to come back.
“There’s a lot of potential advantages in developing some pretty innovative packaging techniques. As university researchers, we try to do innovative research. We’re always trying to do things better. More than just cost-savings, this is a better way of doing things.”
Jay Sasserath, a veteran of small tech who was a process engineer in photolithography with Standard Microsystem — which later became Standard MEMS Inc. — in the 1980s, is a principal in the firm with Fries and is its chief executive. Before joining Fries in the company’s May launch, he had been director of the MEMS devices business unit at Unaxis USA Inc. of St. Petersburg, which sells components for photomask etching.
Sasserath said he expects sales in more than $1 million over the next calendar year.
The maskless process etches details down to the 20-micron range, said Sasserath, not fine enough for high-end chip design. But, he said, that level of detail is perfectly suited for the burgeoning biosensor and lab-on-a-chip field, as well as for packaging of fiber-optic components and advanced packaging of semiconductors.
“Anytime you flow liquids into a MEMS chip, you can’t have channels smaller than 20 microns because of the capillary demands,” he said. “That is a huge market for us.”
Traditionally, a photolithography process is used to etch features on a silicon or polymer base to create a MEMS device. The process is done over a series of stages, depending on the complexity of the finished product. In each stage, a mask, or stencil, is placed over the substrate, allowing some areas to be exposed to light while others are protected.
Masks cost from $500 to $2,000 each, but can be reused to create identical patterns.
After the exposure, the mask is removed and the partly completed device is washed in a solution. The exposed areas disappear, leaving the desired shape or pattern. Then another mask is used and the process repeated to create more detail.
“This will pay for itself in photomasks,” said Sasserath. “We can play in some niche markets and we’ll go after them.”
Etec Inc. marketed maskless photolithography, also called direct-write photolithography, in the 1980s, but it was not profitable.
“Etec sold a direct-write product in the 1980s, but it was considered too slow for production,” said Dave Miller, senior manager of media relations for Applied Materials.
Sasserath said their system uses an entirely different process.
FLOATING AN IDEA
In September 1999, Fries, a chemist who is senior development engineer with the Center for Ocean Technology in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida, had just taken out a device he’d helped design — a mass spectrometer for undersea deployment — for three days of testing.
“We were putting it through its paces,” he said of the device. “I had some time to kill and I was sitting in the back of the boat playing with some ideas. And it came to me then. I couldn’t wait to get back to start working on it.”
“As a chemist, I saw a transformation happening in analytical chemistry. Things were shrinking in size, diminishing in scale,” he said. “I knew this miniaturization paradigm was happening. In the past, all the great leaps in ocean science happened when outside technologies were inserted into the field.
“I knew there was an opportunity for us as a department if we were quick enough and seized the high ground on miniaturization — applying microsystems, microsensors and microactuators — we could be pioneers.”
So the Center for Ocean Technology had started incorporating off-the-shelf devices such as pressure sensors, temperature sensors and accelerometers to start tracking the flow of pollutants across the ocean floor. The devices were also used to detect the growth of microorganism blooms, such as the notorious red tide, which is caused by the release of a toxin by the tiny plant known as gymnodinium breve and kills fish and contaminates shellfish.
But Fries wanted to use MEMS-based biological and chemical sensors, too, and these were not available off the shelf in 1999.
“We wanted to make these things in-house, but the first step you walk into is photolithography. We had no tools, no way to do that,” he said. While rocking in the boat he envisioned a process, one that he said is pretty much the same in prototype form as it was in his head that day at sea.
The process involves a circuit designer figuring out on a PC what kinds of circuits or channels are needed on a substrate. A so-called “smart filter” then translates the electronic files into optical images. The desired image of the circuits or channels is beamed, via mirrors, onto the substrate, which is coated with photosensitive materials.
Once a microscope is used to align the image precisely on the coated substrate, a high-intensity white light source then zaps the image on the substrate. The exposure is then made and the substrate washed in solution.
The process, said Sasserath, can be done with standard silicon substrates or a variety of polymer or ceramic materials.
“The interesting thing is this allows us to think differently,” Fries said. Before it was ‘But this will take us 30 masks.’ Now we can get around that.”
Fries, through USF, applied for patents on the process. He approached Sasserath, then still with Unaxis, thinking he’d make a likely customer or licensee.
“I knew he was competent and knew the business, and I tried to marry the technology to him,” said Fries.
Instead, Sasserath asked to join as a partner. Sasserath and Fries are the principal owners, with the university having a small equity position. They have two full-time employees and another half dozen who work as part-timers or on a contract basis, including process engineers, a designer and an optical scientist.
The company has access to university labs for research and development and has contracted to use 7,500 feet of space for manufacturing and engineering with a St. Petersburg company that has excess capacity.
As for funding, Sasserath said, “We don’t need a lot of capital influx. Our private funding (from angel investors, family and their own money) will keep us going for a while. You want to keep as much equity as possible.”
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.