News Room 2007 (The former Furukawa-Sky)
Furukawa-Sky Awarded the 42nd Oyamada Medal by The Japan Institute of Light Metals
November 12, 2007
Furukawa-Sky has been awarded the 42nd Oyamada Medal by The Japan Institute of Light Metals. The award recognized our work on the development of manufacturing methods for substrate holders applied to manufacturing equipment for semiconductors and flat panel displays. The award ceremony was held November 10, 2007, at the Nishi-Chiba Campus of Chiba University on the occasion of the 113th Conference of Japan Institute of Light Metals. Furukawa-Sky received the award from The Japan Institute of Light Metals and The Light Metal Educational Foundation, Inc. and presented an outline of our work in a lecture commemorating the award.
The Oyamada Medal was established to honor the accomplishments of the late Yukichi Oyamada, former chairman of The Light Metal Educational Foundation, and is presented to those who contributed to inventions, ideas and research involving the establishment of superior technology related to the production of light metals and manufacturing of light metal products in Japan.
We won the award for our hot-forge welding technology applied in the manufacturing of substrate holders for equipment used to manufacture TFT liquid crystal displays, which was commercialized by our Casting and Forging Division in January 2001. The technology is characterized by metal welding large-size aluminum alloy plates through one-shot pressurization using a large-scale forging press when implanting heater circuits into fit clearance created on the interface between two aluminum alloy plates, bonding the heater and aluminum alloy plate at the same time.
Conventional manufacturing equipment for semiconductors and TFT liquid crystal displays used heating plates (substrate holders) made of aluminum alloy plate with implanted heaters for processing substrate glasses. Implanting the heater involved welding or casting (enclosure casting). As the substrate holders became larger, it became difficult to meet the demand for high-quality characteristics, such as high-vacuum sealing properties, flatness uniformity and heat uniformity required for substrate holders, due to such challenges as longer implanting time for heaters and the thermal expansion gap between the aluminum plate and the heater. Furukawa-Sky's hot-forge welded substrate holders resolved these problems and have been adopted in the manufacturing of third-generation (600 × 700 mm) substrate holders.
Our large-scale 15,000-ton forging press, featuring a large, 4,000 × 3,000 mm table, came online in October 2004, and is capable of manufacturing large-scale substrate holders, ranging from sixth-generation units requiring 2,000 mm angles and larger to the currently largest 8.5-generation (2,200 × 2,500 mm) large-scale substrate holders, and maintains the dominant global share for sixth-generation substrate holders and higher.
Until now, Furukawa-Sky's forging business had been focused on areas such as large parts for aeronautics and space, train carriages and ships, as well as vacuum chambers for semiconductor manufacturing equipment. However, since our award-winning forge welding technology can also be applied to thin-film solar panels, we expect further expansion in our forging business. We have already acquired five domestic patents and ten overseas patents related to the technology.