News & Events

Pivotal Systems Launches Multiple New Gas Flow Control Enhancements

Pivotal Systems Corporation (“Pivotal” or the “Company”), a leading provider of innovative gas flow control (GFC) solutions to the semiconductor industry, today announced it continued leadership in the performance of gas flow control, with the launch of enhanced GFC products designed to meet semiconductor device manufacturer demand for advanced process monitoring and control of critical steps in the production of leading-edge silicon wafers.

Continued technical innovation by Pivotal enables the industry’s fastest gas flow control times at 50 milliseconds for the GFC20, GFC200, GFC1000, and GFC2000 products. This continues Pivotal’s technical leadership in operating speed while maintaining the best-in-class flow control accuracy. In addition to the speed improvement, the operating temperature range of these products has been expanded to reach higher safe operating temperatures, now up to 60 degrees Celsius. This represents a material development in the GFC market, providing reproduceable, controllable gas flows at higher temperatures, which are required to support the atomic layer deposition and etch production methods now being utilized by Pivotal’s key customers.

President and Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Joe Monkowski spoke of Pivotal’s continuous innovation keeping it at the leading edge of industry needs. “When the GFC was first introduced, its 100ms speed was significantly faster than any other flow controller, and in fact, exceeded the industry’s need at that time. With today’s advanced processes, however, some processes would see the benefit of even faster performance. To meet this need, Pivotal is introducing its 50ms GFC range, continuing Pivotal’s leadership in flow control. This launch highlights the rapid translation of our R&D investment into additional products in the Pivotal range, expressly designed according to customer requirements today and into the future. Our R&D continues over a number of initiatives, which over the last 12 months to 30 June 2023 represented approximately US$3.4 million of investment.”

Kevin Hill, Chief Executive Officer, stated that “We have accelerated the speed of our GFC, and now these devices offer unparalleled performance for the semiconductor device manufacturers, without any compromise. With this enhancement to the GFC software, we have created more value for our customers, by providing solutions to the most challenging of gas flow controls problems: repeated accurate performance, at speeds not seen before in the industry. The digital positional control architecture of a GFC, is the enabler for better flow control roadmaps.”

Pivotal is taking orders now for this enhanced performance GFC, and there is no additional charge for new devices with this performance enhancement.