Tool removals tend to go wrong for unglamorous reasons.
The tool is ready. The site team is ready. The transport is booked. Then, late in the planning phase, someone asks where the shipping kits are, and the answer is that nobody can supply them.
That was the position a longstanding IES Semiconductor Parts customer, SOITEC in France, found itself in when it prepared to remove three VIISta Trident XP ion implanters. The kits were not available, and with production schedules at stake, the request that reached IES Semiconductor Parts was urgent.
A shipping kit rarely gets the attention of the tool it protects. Yet on a complex implanter, it is what allows delicate assemblies to be supported and secured when the tool is taken apart and moved.
The VIISta Trident XP kits are neither simple nor generic. They are intricate, and they interface with many parts of the tool. That makes them difficult to substitute, and just as difficult to improvise at short notice.
For the engineers planning a removal, the risk is easy to overlook. If the kits are missing, the whole project can stall, however well everything else has been prepared.
Before anything could be made, IES Semiconductor Parts needed something to work from.
Our team went to its contacts in the US and located a single VIISta Trident XP shipping kit. It was sent to IES Semiconductor Parts in the UK by express airfreight.
This is a familiar situation in legacy parts work. The item a customer needs is not on the shelf, but that does not end the conversation. As Niels Morch, Director at IES Semiconductor Parts, puts it:
"A customer comes to us, we don't have it. That doesn't mean it stops there. We will always see if we can get it from somewhere." — Niels Morch, IES Semiconductor Parts
The ability to find a part quickly depends on relationships built up over many years, with customers, brokers and suppliers around the world.
One kit would not solve the problem. SOITEC needed three.
Once the reference kit arrived in the UK, our engineers spent two days drawing it in detail, so that it could be replicated accurately rather than approximated. Because the kit touches so many parts of the tool, that drawing stage is where the real engineering happens. Every interface has to be captured correctly, or the copy will not do its job.
The drawings were completed in two days. The moment they were finished, the original kit was dispatched to France.
The original kit travelled to SOITEC by dedicated transport and arrived on the morning of the agreed delivery date, three weeks after the initial request.
For a customer who had discovered the gap late in the day, that timing mattered. The first kit was on site when it was needed, and the tool removal plan stayed intact.
SOITEC was pleased that the deadline for the first kit had been met.
With the drawings complete, the remaining two kits are now in manufacturing. They are due with SOITEC in early October.
This is the practical value of documenting a part properly. Once a reliable drawing exists, the item is no longer a single point of failure. It can be made again, and the customer is not left depending on whoever happens to hold the last one.
It also reflects a wider principle in supporting mature tools.
If you are planning to remove, relocate or decommission a legacy ion implanter, a few lessons from this project are worth building into your plan:
IES Semiconductor Parts supplies, repairs and remanufactures components for ion implanters, backed by engineers who have worked on these platforms in live manufacturing environments. Projects like this one show what that looks like in practice: finding the item, understanding it, and making it again when it can no longer be bought.
Legacy tools will keep running for as long as the support around them does. Sometimes that support is a part on a shelf. Sometimes it is a drawing, two days of careful engineering and a van arriving on the right morning.
Do you require a shipping kit for your next project? Contact IES Semiconductor Parts via the button below.