Controlled Environments spoke with Byron Exarcos, President of ClassOne Technology.
ClassOne Equipment has been in business for 12 years. The company sells high-quality refurbished equipment for semiconductors, MEMS, and LEDs. They provide full turnkey solutions, fully refurbished systems, professional installation and training, spare parts, and services.
The company has opened a major new cleanroom and applications lab in Atlanta, Ga. The Class 100 facility will focus specifically on wet chemical processing such as electroplating, metal lift-off, resist strip, polymer removal, FEOL and BEOL Cleaning, dielectric and metal etching, and more. The new laboratory will complement ClassOne’s current Metrology Cleanroom Lab in Atlanta, considerably expanding the total size and capabilities of the facility.
“We saw the opportunity come up because customers called us and asked for electroplating tools and also support,” says Byron Exarcos. “Our customers are primarily emerging technologies — hot technologies, MEMS, and LEDs are still booming; sensors, power devices, all these markets are growing and need equipment to rent. So these are all companies who have been on a ramp and are just coming off of working with manual tools and they’re ramping up toward higher volumes.”
“It’s equipped with a full suite of our plating tools and wet process equipment set up and ready to run process. The idea is to ‘drive it before you buy it,’” says Exarcos. “For a company addressing the needs of technologies, it’s not common. We feel like we’re offering the customer more service and capabilities than other competitors can offer. Come to our facility, bring your wafers, and we’ll help you run your process or develop your process. Not only do we have our process tools but we also have metrology and process equipment.”
“Customers can see the uniformity there, rather than sending their wafers back to the fab for measurement,” he continues. “Here we have, in the same cleanroom, both the process tools and the metrology tools to take all the measurements.”
“We set up a lab where customers considering any of these tools can ‘drive before they buy.’ Customers these days are much more careful about what they buy … they want to try it and prove it out before they buy it. The most important thing is that it’s the right tool, that it’ll meet the customer process, and that it will hit the ground running. Customers want the least possible development time at their fab.”