Semiconductor History | ULVAC Chigasaki — The Vacuum Cluster That Kept Wafers Clean
· 1985-12
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Semiconductor History | ULVAC Chigasaki — The Vacuum Cluster That Kept Wafers Clean
kevin
In December 1985, ULVAC launched the MCH-9000 series, which the company describes as the world’s first multi-chamber sputtering system. The machine linked several vacuum process chambers around a transfer system so a wafer could receive different thin films without repeatedly returning to ordinary air.
That architecture addressed a quiet but decisive manufacturing problem. Modern chips are stacks of extremely controlled materials, and every transfer risks particles, moisture, oxidation, or other contamination. Keeping multiple steps inside a controlled vacuum environment made the interfaces between films part of the equipment design rather than a problem left to the factory aisle.
The good result was a Japanese equipment capability that grew beside the country’s device makers. ULVAC had begun in 1952 by importing and selling vacuum equipment, started domestic production in the 1950s, and moved its headquarters and plant to Chigasaki in 1968. By the 1980s, it could sell an integrated semiconductor platform that its commemorative history says was adopted by device manufacturers worldwide.
The bad side was exposure to the same cycle as its customers, amplified by the cost of complex tools. Multi-chamber systems require vacuum pumps, robotics, process modules, controls, and long customer qualifications. A new generation consumes engineering and factory capacity before orders are secure; a semiconductor downturn can leave both the toolmaker and its suppliers carrying expensive fixed resources.
Integration also creates lock-in. Once a chipmaker has qualified recipes, chambers, spare parts, and service procedures around a cluster platform, changing vendors is difficult. That rewards reliability, but it can also concentrate process risk in one tool architecture and make incremental upgrades costly.
ULVAC continued the idea with the CERAUS ultra-high-vacuum multi-chamber deposition series in 1991. The larger lesson is that Japan’s chip rise depended not only on transistor designs and wafer fabs, but on firms that learned to control the invisible atmosphere between one film and the next.
This photograph shows ULVAC’s active Chigasaki headquarters from the public street. It is the continuing corporate and engineering site, not a claim that the pictured building contains the original 1985 MCH-9000 line.
Sources: [ULVAC technology history](https://www.ulvac.co.jp/en/research_development/history/); [ULVAC company history](https://www.ulvac.co.jp/en/company/history/); [ULVAC 2014 PowerBook](https://www.ulvac.co.jp/eng/powerbook/PowerBook2014_EN.pdf); [ULVAC company profile](https://www.ulvac.co.jp/en/company/outline/).
Photo: 五虎将軍, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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