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TWST: What is Ceramics Process Systems?
Mr. Bennett: Ceramics Process Systems, or CPS, is a manufacturer of
custom components used in certain electronic applications to increase
reliability. More specifically, we manufacture heat sinks, heat
spreaders, carrier plates, lids, and housings in which active electronic
devices, primarily integrated circuits, are housed. Everyone is familiar
with an integrated circuit, but to be useful, that integrated circuit
needs to be connected to other components. The electronics industry
refers to the housing in which the integrated circuit is placed as first
level packaging. We produce components used in first level packaging.
Second level packaging is the level the general population is more
familiar with ' namely connecting hybrid circuits and sub-assemblies. We
produce components used at this level as well. We are a customer
manufacturer of these components. We don't have a catalog of standard
items; everything we produce is to customers' blueprints. The company
was founded in 1984 as a spinoff from the Materials Science Department
at MIT. For the first decade, we were primarily involved in research in
advanced ceramics and composites. In the 1993 time frame, the management
was changed and the company made a fundamental change in direction to
focus on using the technology we had developed to build a manufacturing
company rather than continuing to focus only on research. We chose to
focus on using our composite technology to produce products to solve the
problems caused by heat in electronics, an area known as thermal
management. We are pleased we are now the world leader in that area, and
the market applications we serve are growing. So, in short, CPS is a 20-
year-old company, but with two very different chapters: 10 years in a
research and development mode and the last 10 years introducing
composites to the market in a market and manufacturing development mode.
Let me just provide a little bit of background on heat spreaders and why
what we do is important. When most materials heat up, they expand
slightly, and when they cool down, they contract. Perhaps you see this
most obviously when you go over a bridge on a highway where there is an
expansion joint. That bridge is a couple of inches longer on the hottest
day of the year than it is on the coldest day of the year. In the
electronics area, as integrated circuits heat up, they expand slightly,
and as they cool down, they contract. If an integrated circuit is only
using a small amount of power ' for example, something powered by a
battery ' this expansion and contraction is insignificant. But where
integrated circuits are carrying a great deal of power and/or there are
a large number of interconnects, if the integrated circuits expand and
contract at a different rate from the materials onto which they are
mounted and connected, they will delaminate off of whatever they are
mounted onto and fail. We have developed a material wherein we can
control the rate at which the material expands and contracts so we can
match the expansion rate to the other components in the system. We have
also engineered this material to have high thermal conductivity, meaning
that it removes heat efficiently from the heat generating devices. So
the applications where we add real value are those where heat has become
a problem, limiting the performance of the system and affecting
reliability. There are two primary market segments we serve. The first
is the Power Semiconductor segment or, more technically, the IGBT or
Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor segment. This segment consists of
modules used to control electric motors. The modules incorporating IGBTs
rectify, condition, and control the electric current going into the
motor. These IBGTs get very hot and the failure mode of the modules is
delamination of the IBGTs from the rest of the module due to differences
in thermal expansion. By providing a substrate that has a very close
expansion match to the IGBTs that are mounted on the substrate we
significantly increase the reliability and the lifetime of these motor
controller modules. Customers have demonstrated a 10 times increase in
lifetime using our substrates. A second segment we serve is in housing
individual integrated circuits using the interconnect architecture
called flip-chip. These integrated circuits are high-end microprocessors
and high-end, application-specific integrated circuits primarily used in
various Internet switching applications. Once again, a lot of heat is
generated in a very small area, and in order to ensure the integrated
circuits do not delaminate and fail, they must be housed in components
with similar expansion rates. Generally, metals expand as they heat up
at a fairly high rate and most ceramics expand at a fairly low rate. We
have developed a composite material that is a combination of metal and
ceramic. The metal is aluminum and ceramic is silicon carbide. The
resulting product is called aluminum silicon carbide, or ALSiC for its
chemical symbols. We produce custom AlSiC components for the major
electronics companies.
Tickers included in this excerpt: CPSX
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The
Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does
not make stock recommendations.
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