ENTROPY LTD LLC

  ENTROPY LTD LLC has over 32 years of Technical Experience in Vacuum Technology, Chemistry, Materials and Process Engineering.

         Started in 1993 as a consulting company it has provided Ultra High Vacuum designing services, failure analysis, chemical cleaning and materials investigation services for industry.   Providing services to variety of manufacturing/engineering issues by:

• improving vacuum processing equipment
• designing improved vacuum processing stations
• improving yields for brazed components
• design of chemical cleaning process
• develop in process measures
• improving optical sealing, optical alignment
  
• improving/designing better hermetic seals
  
• providing accurate materials analysis to materials control
• provide failure analysis expertise
  
• provide debrazing service (Alumina from Sapphire)
• Provide better cleaning processes for critical optical components

          Expertise in UHV technology,  applied chemistry and analytical chemistry in combination with practical engineering approaches to problems solving and providing basic services in chemical cleaning, debrazing and process control.

 As an example of the benefit of materials analysis to resolve a warranty issue for a semi conductor company

              Company : Semi Conductor

              Problem:  Reference voltage remains high after mil std. temp/humidity test.

              Cause;  Residual Cations from detergent thermally diffused to implanted resistor bank,  which proved to be too shallow by several microns.

              Techniques used:  ESCA, XPS, TOF SIMS, SIMS and various electrical testing.

              Synopsis:  Electrical Analysis of the circuitry revealed a thermally driven change in reactance;  schematically only one bank of implanted resistors could account for the measured changes.   Subsequent depth analysis of these implanted resistors showed them as too shallow. Combined with Dynamic SIMS of wafer pre-implantation showed Potassium Cations.  Thermal diffusion modeling showed that these Cations were in sufficient concentration to produce the observed change in resistance and thus keeping Vref high post QC test.  The solution was to improve rinsing procedures and implement verification testing to insure compliance.

 Materials investigation or analysis:  

                  Entropy LTD uses outside analytical laboratories for any materials analysis. This is to insure that the necessary expertise is brought to bear on the problem.  The questions that need to be answered first are:

   Is this the best techique given the material and what is being measured?

   What are the caveats of the analysis? ie. false positives, adventitious contamination from the local environment)  How should the results be interpreted?

                 Doing the correct material analysis is many times critical as the above example indicates - providing context to the client as to the limitations and what conclusions can be drawn from the results are more critical than the numbers generated from the analysis itself.

                 As well careful consideration to the conditions and the processes that the material encountered prior to the testing or analysis. All of these must be considered so that the results provide real value to the customer and not an attention grabbing number.

                I personally think this is why many companies are reticent in doing any chemical or materials analysis. It can consume money, time and most importantly credibility. Most companies I have worked with are reluctant to pursue any materials investigations due to concerns of this type.

               The same is true of any other type of analysis done whether it be Mass Spectroscopy or TOF SIMS.  Pursuing the right series of analysis can lead to finding a rapid solution to a specific problem.

             This occurred for a metal coating company where ametal coating chamber had been deemed unusable and so production schedules were falling behind. Teams of engineers, two process engineers and two manufacturing engineers were not successful in finding a solution over the period of almost two years. 

                It wasn't my skill as a consultant that resolved this problem but simply determining the best analytical technique that made sense in this case and so by using Dynamic SIMS to determine thickness of each coating and its purity: it was easy then to work backwards to find out that in trying to solve the problem an incorrect supposition was made and a change to the configuration: from metal to ceramic boats. Now it was a problem of heat transfer - nothing to do with the materials or the coating equipment itself.

                The problem was solved within two weeks and the equipment was up and running after qualification runs within the month. 

•  Our Business

  We just moved from San Jose to Pine Grove California this year. 

 We are a small company that specializes in Ultra High Vacuum systems design, electro optical packaging design, process engineering, micro contamination control, brazing and chemical cleaning.

Having successfully served over 23 clients over the last 16 years across multiple disciplines- from Semiconductor to Mems to the Laser industry to Biomedical-innovative solutions are our business. We are proud of our track record of finding solutions when others have failed.

   * Ask for our brochure with more examples of problems solved.

Previous Clients

Spectra Physics Lasers

Astec Semi Conductor

Uniphase Lasers

EverGreen Lasers

De La Rue Giori

Conductus

Molecular Dynamics

Laserscope

Trumpf Photonics

Oxford X Ray

ILC Technologies - Now Philips Electronics

Newport Corp