Brewer Science Installs Scale-up Reactor

Brewer Science, a leader in lithography enhancement materials for semiconductor manufacturing for over 30 years and commercial supplier of electronics-grade carbon nanotube (CNT) materials, announces the installation of a scale-up reactor to increase production of its CNTRENE® C100 family of electronics-grade CNT materials by tenfold. Such materials are used in chemical and biological sensors and nanotube-based nonvolatile random access memory device applications, which require extremely low levels of metal ion contaminants with concentration limits in parts per billion.

“Small-scale reaction equipment can only take manufacturing so far with respect to quality and delivery time. This new scale-up reactor will provide the capability to complete weeks of reactions in three days while producing materials that meet stringent microelectronics specifications,” said Dr. Stephen Gibbons, Director of Technology of Brewer Science’s Carbon Electronics Center.

Jim Lamb, Director of Business Development for the Carbon Electronics Center stated ‘’With increasing customer usage and the move toward commercial adoption in devices, we needed to implement our third round of scale-up to support market demand. Growth of our CNTRENE® C100 family of products is driven by their use in nanotube-based nonvolatile random access memory devices, a universal CNT memory structure developed by Nantero, Inc., sold under the name NRAM, which could replace embedded memory, DRAM, SRAM, and flash memory devices. This structure allows flexible placement of memory in the device stack and can be stacked for vertically placed memory cells. NRAM devices provide other key benefits including robustness, 3-nanosecond write speeds, low operating power, radiation-hardened memory cells, and the ability to perform at high operating temperatures.”

Jim Lamb from Brewer Science will be presenting at the upcoming Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC). He will speak about “Carbon Nanotubes Solutions for Packaging and Wireless Sensors” (presentation IS2.4.3) on Thursday, March 21, at the industry session on Nanotechnology Applications in Power Electronics.

This progress in CNT manufacturing is an example of how Brewer Science continues its long history of introducing unique and innovative materials technologies, bringing them to scaled manufacture with the performance and purity required for state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing.