His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, today performed the opening ceremony for a prestigious new £2million purpose-built ‘micro-structure’ manufacturing facility at the headquarters of world-leading specialist Tecan Limited, Weymouth, Dorset. During his visit, the Prince praised the company’s dynamic approach in the development and manufacture of micro-structures at the highly refined new unit.

"It is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to visit this new facility and to congratulate your Chairman Paul Cane and his staff on this remarkable achievement," said His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. "Clearly, this is incredibly complex cutting edge technology and appears to be moving into rather esoteric realms. The kind of technology you employ here puts you in a world-leading position. Weymouth benefits greatly from having this company here. We are enormously proud of you and for what you achieve for this country."

Within the new 8,000sq/ft facility, a wide range of micro-sized metal parts and ultra-fine feature metal parts will be produced for the world’s most discerning companies, to be used in demanding next-generation applications in areas such as electronics, optical, medical and aerospace. The new building houses offices, stores facilities and a state-of-the-art Class 1000 clean room, within which are a number of Class 100 areas.

These highly clean areas ensure the provision of particle-free environments where components with sub-micron features can be repeatedly and consistently fabricated.

The company has developed state-of-the-art electroforming production techniques to make such cost-effective accuracy possible. Previously in the manufacturing world, micro electromechanical system parts (MEMS) have predominantly been manufactured in silicon, using expensive technology from the semiconductor industry. Tecan currently produces such parts in new materials, such as nickel, at significantly lower cost, and has plans to move into other pure conductive materials such as copper, silver and gold in the near future.

"This new facility throws the flood gates of opportunity wide open, for design engineers across all industries - providing affordable, technologically advanced, micro-engineered parts. It represents an important and exciting step in Tecan’s continuing development, as a world-leading technology driven company", said Paul Cane, Tecan’s founder and chairman. "We will be working closely with our existing and new customers to manufacture micro-structures to extremely small scale, with features down to one or two microns, and with tolerances at sub-micron levels. We are honoured that His Royal Highness’ visit gives recognition to the importance of this development for the electronics and micro-manufacturing industries."

The inherent advantages of the technology will be adopted by a wide range of industries, where future products will be made significantly smaller and finer, at lower cost and with fewer production processes. Typically, these will include embossing tools and shims for the production of micro-fluidic channel products for medical applications, optical instrument lens arrays, defraction gratings, encoder disks, MEMs, optical MEMs (OMEMs) and progressive designs for electronics and aerospace developments. In addition to the production of ultra-small products, the company is able to produce larger parts, up 12-inch (300mm x 300mm) square, with equally accurate surface features.

Representing just one, of the many micro-replication capabilities of the new facility, is the continuing development of ‘imprint patterning’, particularly for the electronics industry. This is a new high-density circuit formation process involving the production of a fine-pitch metal stamp, or embossed tool foil, which can be used in a traditional laminating press to imprint its image directly onto a malleable substrate, producing ultra-fine circuit traces and connections. The imprinted substrate, is then metallised to produce exceptionally accurate high-density integrated (HDI) circuitry.

As the world’s only company capable of fabricating the metal tool foils to the required levels of accuracy and planar consistency, Tecan is at the heart of this high-volume, precision embossing technology - which has the potential of revolutionising the manufacture of micro-connection printed circuit boards and HDI fabrications.

"One of the greatest benefits to our customers, is an increasing appreciation of photo-electroforming (PEF) and the opportunities it offers their designers as they liaise with our own", said Noel Cherowbrier, Tecan’s sales and marketing director. "As designers’ relationships develop, they increasingly realise that we can make micro-metal components with more exacting designs and tighter tolerances than they ever realised were achievable. Unique and extremely sophisticated three-dimensional parts are now being conceived as OEM engineers and designers think laterally with the wider technology envelope available to them - through the traditional ‘X/Y’ axis, and now beyond - through exploitation of the ‘Z’ axis too."

Specialised electroforming equipment, installed in the new Class-1000 and Class-100 clean rooms, includes an unusually large, 12-inch (300mm x 300mm) Mask Aligner which ensures exceptional accuracy, of less than one micron, across its operating surface.

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