solvay_live243_p02a04 somEdito

104408
PRODUCING YET PURER “E-GRADE”
HYDROFLUORIC ACID THROUGH ENHANCED
ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES
IF YOU CAN’T MEASURE IT,
YOU CAN’T IMPROVE IT!
Hydrofluoric acid (HF), a high purity grade
for the electronics produced in Alorton
(USA), was suitable for its applications,
meanwhile due to a lack of sufficiently
precise analytical methods, it was impossible
to characterise it and, above all, to make
further progress. No sooner said than done,
as thanks to this project the experience
of trace analysis acquired in high purity
hydrogen peroxide has been transferred
to HF. The innovation consisted, first of all,
of creating an adapted analytical environment
(“clean room” concept), and installing
the necessary devices with the required
detection power. The teams then
focused their attention on minimising the
preparation of the sample, which was
reduced to a simple dilution: under half an hour
in all. The method has now proven its
robustness and has become the reference for
the semi-conductor industry. It has effectively
made it possible to pinpoint and improve
the quality of our products and to increase
our sales and our market shares on the high
purity market.
> Koen Vermeiren; Doug Boyer;
Jean-Marie Collard.
> CC ANALYTICAL TECHNOLOGIES
105025
PATENT ALERTING SYSTEM
SPEED MAKES
ALL THE DIFFERENCE
Patent Patent
Building on the strengths of the Tech Watch
system, the alert service makes it possible
to draw the attention of a target scientific
community to the existence of certain patents
as soon as they are published, proactively
and at a low cost. For this service, the speed
of communication takes priority over
the exhaustiveness of the monitoring coverage.
In fact, when the patents are published, they
are generally only available in their original
submission language. It can take up to three
months before an English summary of a
sufficient quality becomes available, either
in the commercial databases, or on the sites
of the patent offices. The immediate detection
of a patent as soon as it is published calls, thus,
for a search to be carried out on the basis
of the language in which it is published and/or
on the basis of the minimum classification
granted by the patent offices. This limitation
inevitably diminishes the exhaustiveness of the
monitoring coverage. That is why the alert
service is reserved in practice to the surveillance
of the titles of third parties that could
potentially pose an obstacle to the Solvay
activities in Europe and in the US, and to those
cases in which it is important to be quickly
and proactively informed. Each member
of the target community is alerted directly
and exclusively by electronic mail. They are
therefore in a position to react: make
comments, warn a colleague, etc. The alert
service takes place in various stages:
surveillance of databases specialising in patents
by a robot, extraction of the data corresponding
to the selection criteria, extraction of patents
from free access Internet sites, examination
of the information relevance by specialists,
and if of interest, dispatch of an e-mail alert
to the researchers.
> Thierry Depireux; Antoine Amory; Philippe Jacques;
Christian Thiriaux; Aalt Vandekuilen.
> CC IAM
Customer oriented projects
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