Sci-Tron Ltd have been successful in receiving an award of 500k GBP from InnovateUK to enable the growth and development of the company.
This peer-reviewed grant will start in Spring 2019 for a period of 18 months.
InnovateUK Project Number 104747 is titled ‘Development and commercialisation of resist technologies for nanofabrication’.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/innovate-uk-funded-projects
Dr Stephen Yeates FRSC, Director of Sci-Tron Limited and Professor of Polymer Chemistry at the University of Manchester:
“This grant will allow the company to recruit its own dedicated staff focussing on chemical synthesis, standard operating procedures for manufacture of product and to scale up the production capabilities.”
“The scale-up of production is being done in collaboration with a global toll manufacturer to ISO standards.”
“The purpose of this project is to optimise performance of the resists and focus on scale-up production while establishing a strict quality control protocol.”
“This is not an industry that can allow significant failure of any step in the process of making integrated circuits. Failure of a single batch of resist could cost millions of pounds in damaged writing equipment.”
The Innovate UK project will enable Sci-Tron to translate novel outputs of world leading research to build our capacity to supply the resists markets.
At the commencement of the project, Sci-Tron have returned promising results to suggest the novel resist material provided a major competitive advantage and an ability to produce resists in laboratory conditions at a gram scale.
The project is designed to enable Sci-Tron to develop a flexible manufacturing process to produce a catalogue of resists to satisfy a large number of potential end-users that will have diverse needs, diverse scale and who may use either Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) or Photolithography (PL) as a writing tool.
“For some resists there is a need to scale-up and maintain low cost; for other bespoke resists small scale will be sufficient, but with the capacity to produce on demand and with a high profit on small amounts of material.” adds Professor Yeates.
Sci-Tron will work in partnership with the University of Manchester. The award will also allow continued access to the world leading facilities at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) at University of Manchester (UoM) to allow Sci-Tron to validate and evaluate resist performance in ISO accredited facilities.
Key project activities include;
- design and build a flexible manufacturing facility capable of a 20kg per annum throughput of resist, and capable of switching between different resist formulations to meet specific end-user requirements,
- complete application specific testing with key partners to develop resist materials to TRL6, and
- develop a complete business plan detailing the resources, distribution and supply chain required, and the value proposition, team composition and expected financial outcomes for Sci-Tron.
- Identification and access to next stage funding sources