Tomas Bauer
Senior Vice President, Sales & Business Development, Silex Microsystems

Biography

Tomas Bauer has been in charge of developing the global business development and foundry strategy of Silex Microsystems since he joined the company in 2004. With a strong focus to understand the market and customer needs, he has deployed a successful business strategy for Silex in the MEMS Foundry space. With Silex being one of the leading players in its field, his work at Silex has played a contributing role in shaping the global MEMS and Sensor foundry market evolution. Prior to joining Silex, Tomas held positions with Temex and Ericsson Microelectronics.

Abstract

The sensor industry is constantly inventing new ideas that are changing our everyday lives. MEMS based sensors have been marching into the world we live in over the last two decades and there is no sign that this evolution will come to a halt anytime soon. In fact, we have most likely only seen the beginning as the industry is getting busier every day, creating new innovations for Med-Tech, Smart Cities, IoT, VR/AR, Autonomous Vehicles and more.

MEMS sensor foundry processing compared to IC foundry processing takes place in wafer fabs that look virtually the same but hold fundamental differences that are necessary to understand and manage in order to achieve efficient and competitive time to market for innovative MEMS based sensor products. Where IC process development often rests on decades of process legacy, applying only minor tweaks to a well-known fundamental baseline, innovative MEMS sensor manufacturing requires an accelerated approach to setting up a robust customized process.

One way the industry has tried to solve this issue is to make custom MEMS more “IC like” by offering standard process platforms. This works well in the IC space where the foundry owns the process platform capable of providing fundamental design parameters (feature size, voltage, parasitics etc), and the foundry customer will create and compete against its peers by developing a product design and stack of 2D masks within the limitations and design rules of the IC process. The challenge such approach puts on MEMS is that MEMS is very often competing not only in the 2D top view of the design but actually much more in the integrated 3D stack, comprising also the vertical axis of the mechanical design with a far wider range of process parameter dependency than any process simulation software can properly manage today.

Building a standard process platform in MEMS worthy of the definition very often ends up being a very poor compromise of all challenges the application is facing. The most competitive product design needs to play at the limitation of what is physically possible, leaving very few options to compromise.

Silex is a leading Pure Play MEMS foundry provider with decades of experience manufacturing customized MEMS products for innovation leaders in the MEMS industry. This presentation will share some of the fundamental support systems and protocols developed by Silex to help MEMS foundry customers get to market with a competitive product in the fastest possible time. The presentation will also share Silex plans to build out large scale wafer foundry manufacturing capacity for new and innovative MEMS and sensors in its 200mm wafer “Fab3” currently under construction in Beijing.