Microfluidic wafers in the current biomedical industry are like sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT), allowing various drugs or materials to be automatically combined or separated in microfluidic channels, resulting in the automation of many manually-operated procedures. R & D and production efficiency, and its manufacturing technology and MEMS have many common ground, so it is one of the powerful technologies for the semiconductor industry to reach the biomedical industry.
According to the Nikkei website, SAMCO is actively developing a technology that is a surface treatment technology for Cyclo Olefin Polymer (COP): The advantages of COP are its excellent optical properties, suitable for microfluidic wafer flow. Road materials, but their low hydrophilicity and low adhesion of glass substrates, must be irradiated with ultraviolet light and heat and pressure treatment, which will affect its optical properties, and low hydrophilicity also have adverse effects on the flow of gene drugs.
The COP's new processing technology developed by SAMCO was originally used in the electrode oxide reduction process. The use of water vapor plasma surface treatment technology can improve the hydrophilicity of the COP and the glass substrate surface, and can be processed under the normal temperature environment. Helps accelerate microchannel wafer fabrication.
According to a survey conducted by Fuji Kimera Research of Japan, the market size of micro-channel wafers will reach 29.1 billion yen (about 272 million U.S. dollars) in 2019. In the future, in the field of rapid screening and preventive medicine for various diseases, There will be a wide range of applications.
Among SAMCO's existing semiconductor devices, there are devices that can be modified to produce micro-channel wafers. It is now planned to sell the improved devices to the medical community, and to observe the market reaction and consider whether to further develop micro-channel wafer-specific manufacturing equipment.
Before the development of new equipment, SAMCO decided to set up the company in the Sunnyvale Research Lab in California, and transfer it to Santa Clara in the same state on May 1, 2018, and increase the number of local researchers from the current 7 to 14 to 15. Film formation technology including COP manufacturing technology to enhance the competitiveness of the plant in the semiconductor and biomedical field market.