The process development of silicon nitride micro sieves and contactor plates is carried out at the Royal Philips Electronics MiPlaza facility at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. Product design and prototyping of application development tools is being done in-house by fluXXion in close cooperation with the clean room facilities of Philips Electronics. Application know-how is being jointly developed with strategic partners in fluXXion's application laboratories and partner’s application laboratories. Mass production of the micro sieves and contacor plates is being outsourced to an existing, mature integrated circuit production waferfab. Mechanical fabrication and assembly of mechanical and electronic components are outsourced to device development partners in different regions to allow adaptation to local process control, electricity, design and safety regulations. Testing of all products is done at the fluXXion premises in Eindhoven.

fluXXion initially supports end users with the design and development of pilot plants and later, full industrial scale installations. This is achieved in cooperation with leading original equipment manufacturing partners.

High precision

Fundamentally the semiconductor technology offers extremely high precision as demonstrated by the choice of pore sizes from 0.35µm and higher with increments of less than 0.05µm. We have for instance shown that a reduction of 0.05µm in pore size resulted in a factor of 10-100 reduction of a certain spore in dairy products!

Reproducibility

The pore size distribution within a micro sieve and from micro sieve to micro sieve is kept within an extremely small range. The in-process controls and procedures from our regular waferfab and the end qualification by SEM(scanning electron microscope) measurements guarantee a very reproducible micro sieve performance.

Within the total fabrication cycle we strictly adhere to the approved and qualified processflows. Together with our wafer supplier we have gone through a rigorous qualification cycle as this is the standard in the semiconductor industry. These tests included lifetime test both statically and dynamically. With every new design we go through a standard release procedure before starting production. In addition we check every micro sieve on defects before it leaves fluXXion by an advanced bubble test procedure.