Annual Report 2011 (5.07 MB, PDF-File) - Oerlikon

Time to market
30 % faster
It usually takes a semiconductor industry coating machines
manufacturer three to four years to qualify a new generation of
machines. There are few competitors in this market segment,
even though the final products – laptops and tablet computers,
cell phones, smartphones and smart TVs – are integral to the
daily lives of millions. Our machines coat the wafers that accommodate
– depending on their size – dozens to hundreds of
thousands of microchips that are a key part of such electronic
devices.
Innovation and speed is what counts in this industry. The more
quickly electronics manufacturers can bring products to
market, the more successful they are. As a supplier for the
electronics industry, Oerlikon Systems also operates according
to this rule.
“It took just a year and nine months to deliver HEXAGON, our
latest generation of machines, to the first customer,” says Bart
Scholte van Mast, Head of Engineering at Oerlikon Systems.
Speed creates an unparalleled competitive advantage for the
company. “Our platform strategy made this possible. The machine
components we use are based on modular designs.”
Oerlikon Systems uses components taken directly from
HEXAGON’s predecessor model, CLUSTERLINE ® , and from
machines in the solar and optical storage-media businesses
in the process. Oerlikon Systems’ competitors don’t have
access to the synergies created by a cross-sector portfolio
such as ours.
Platform strategy
“About 70 % of the parts we use in HEXAGON are created on
the basis of modular designs,” says Albert Koller, Head of
Semiconductors at Oerlikon Systems. At the beginning of
2011, when development of HEXAGON was already well underway,
a key customer had an additional requirement. “Thanks
to our modular design approach, integration of the additional
process step needed to meet the customer’s need wasn’t a
problem.” It took Oerlikon Systems just three months to design
and implement a solution based on an existing CLUSTERLINE ®
module. The customer project, from start to qualification, will
take little more than two years.
The tremendous cost pressure in the semiconductor industry
means each new generation of machines must deliver significantly
higher productivity.
Machine components are based on modular designs.