Mr. Granger: Ultra Clean was founded in 1991 by Mitsubishi Corporation. The intent was for us to be a manufacturer of gas delivery subsystems for the semiconductor capital equipment industry. Basically, gas delivery systems are used on most front-end process manufacturing tools in the semiconductor capital equipment industry. Etch tools, CVD (chemical vapor deposition), ion implant, virtually all semiconductor front-end process tools use gas delivery systems. We were established to manufacture those in 1991. In 2002 I led a management buyout, and then in 2004 we completed an initial public offering. In 2005 we opened up our first manufacturing facility outside of the United States in Shanghai, China; and then in 2006, we successfully completed our first acquisition, a company called Sieger Engineering. At the end of 2007, we opened our second manufacturing facility in Shanghai; and at the end of 2009, we acquired a new facility in Singapore.
TWST: Tell us about your products.
Mr. Granger: The best way to think of Ultra Clean Technology is essentially as a high-end contract manufacturer. We manufacture products or subsystems for our customers that are highly customized, very complex but in relatively low volume. Our initial products were gas delivery subsystems that literally controlled the flow of gases into and out of reaction chambers in semiconductor process tools used for depositing layers of film or etching away layers of film on a semiconductor wafer. After many years of manufacturing gas delivery systems, we expanded into doing some of the larger modules that the gas delivery systems go onto. Recently, we've started expanding into adjacent industries. We now make inspection equipment for the flat-panel industry, so you can think of flat-panel TVs or flat-panel displays. We also manufacture robots for a medical device company called Intuitive Surgical (ISI). They have created a surgical robotic tool, and we manufacture all of their robots. We also are expanding into another market, the research market, where we manufacture scanning electron microscopes for one of our customers, FEI Corporation.
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