Ensights

The growth of the biomanufacturing industry has created a demand for new and high-performance fluid handling systems and technologies for the management and storage of cell and gene therapy intermediates and gene-based medicines. New modalities come with risks that don’t yet have good solutions.

Changing one material in the semiconductor manufacturing process has a cascading effect on multiple process steps. Consider the replacement of tungsten (W) and copper (Cu) with molybdenum (Mo). Integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) are implementing Mo in advanced designs, focusing on 2-nanometer (nm) nodes and below. Mo is highly conductive, can be deposited without a titanium or titanium nitrid

Silicon carbide (SiC) has become popular with chipmakers. Its wide-bandgap structure offers many design benefits for the operations of power semiconductors. Compared to silicon, SiC wafers enable the fabrication of faster, more efficient devices that can both operate at higher temperatures and remain stable when deployed in extreme temperature environments. Processing SiC wafers using the same materials and methods as silicon wafers is not a viable option, however.

Powder can be a mess when not delt with properly. Have you ever dropped a bag of flour on the floor after coming home from the store? Cleaning up the mess is terrible (speaking from experience, don’t add water or you just make glue). Now imagine doing that in a manufacturing suite with powdered media. The powder is literally designed to grow cells, so anything you miss is just a new petri dish that can generate contamination. Plus, there’s the added challenge of having to validate that the room is clean after attending to the spill.

Entegris is delighted to announce our new interactive tool intended to help the life sciences industry better understand how we can support the entire drug manufacturing process. Our growing life sciences portfolio can be overwhelming for customers, and this simple tool helps guide them to finding all the ways we can help. The tool was designed to be versatile and can be shared by our team as part of a sales overview, or you can explore it yourself to quickly learn more about the solutions we offer.

If you asked a semiconductor process engineer to name their biggest challenge when tackling the next technology node, they would likely tell you it is figuring out how to achieve high device yields. This is mainly due to an increase in possible points of contamination as the number of potential contaminants grows and their sizes shrink. It is becoming particularly difficult to detect metal contaminants and pinpoint their root cause so they can be eliminated. That’s because they can form anywhere in the process flow.

In the early days of semiconductor manufacturing, fabs would remove contaminants from their process fluids in a sequence that could be analogized to making a cup of coffee. By using a filter with tiny pores, large contaminants (coffee grounds) are separated from water. Because the coffee grounds are too large to pass through the filter, they can’t pass into the coffee we drink.

Biopharma manufacturing is an essential part of the healthcare industry, producing lifesaving treatments for patients around the world. Traditional manufacturing methods can have a significant environmental impact driven by stainless steel equipment requiring extensive cleaning and sterilization processes that consume substantial amounts of water and energy in addition to cleaning agents.

For decades, the semiconductor device manufacturing mantra was “How do we make them smaller, cheaper, and faster?” The pursuit of Moore’s Law – the doubling of transistors on a chip every two years – was achieved through planar scaling. But that approach could only go on for so long. The mantra now is “How do we improve power, performance, area, and cost (PPAC)?” At the 14 nm node, it was clear that the best way to push the limits of semiconductor device PPAC was to take it into the third dimension.

Entegris is delighted to announce our collaboration with Agilitech, a pioneering partner to the biotech industry. Agilitech provides highly flexible, scalable, and future-proof single-use technologies for every step of the bioprocess. These include chromatography systems, mixers, and custom-tailored bioprocess controllers that scale from the laboratory to commercial production environments. This makes them a natural fit for the unique needs of life sciences customers.

Things are not always as they appear. Take semiconductor manufacturing. On the surface, it may seem that the secret to making semiconductor devices more advanced lies in the design. But just as an architect’s design for a building may not be structurally feasible without the right materials, a semiconductor device design may not be functional if the materials and their interactions are not considered and optimized.