CASE STUDY - LAM RESEARCH

In 2006 I worked for a startup in Boston that was involved with design and engineering of an inductively coupled plasma light source for low-K semiconductor film processing. I was tasked with bringing the lamp from a benchtop demonstration to a 30kW product released to our customers at Novellus. The entire design took approximately two years to get into the hands of the engineers at our customer’s facility. After the program ended, the engineers at Novellus continued to develop the technology. As Nielltronix just got going, Novellus was purchased by LAM Research, and Nielltronix continued supporting the lamp development program. That program continued for some time, with Nielltronix providing ongoing support and development for the lamp program until 2014. The lamp development eventually ended and Nielltronix went on to other developments. Then in 2021 it was brought to my attention from a third party that a division of LAM Research was in need of some electrical engineering support. I reached out and, as it happens, the person leading the search was good friends with the engineers I had worked with all those years ago. Specifically, they were looking for help evaluating an external vendor’s power supply development work. Given the complexity of the product and the stringent specifications, the difficulty of the external vendor’s program was extreme. After several rounds of review, recommendation, editing and evaluating, the vendor was able to create a custom solution that is in production now. Given the success with that interaction along with the long-standing personal connection, LAM continues to utilize Nielltronix for independent design review and electrical engineering consultation.