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that Ganymede’s performance and
efficiency advantages will define
demand from the new fabs going up
around the country.
“We’re initially replacing our
IXH pumps with Ganymede pumps,
because they’re much better from
a performance perspective — they
use a lot less energy, and they’re in
a smaller footprint,” Papsidero
said. “The decision was that
we would not even make
IXH pumps here, because
we believe customers are
going to really demand this
new technology. When
we designed the strategy
around this factory, we
basically said, ‘No, we’re
going all in on Ganymede.’”
That confidence traces
back to how Ganymede was
engineered in the first place.
Newer wafer manufacturing
processes push higher gas flow
rates that strain pumping speeds,
and “exotic” new materials create
byproducts that can be corrosive or
hazardous — on top of long-standing
challenges like chemical vapor
deposition (CVD), whose byproducts
Edwards has likened to dumping
pounds of sand down a pump’s inlet.
At the same time, chipmakers are
under growing pressure from their
own customers to hit sustainability
targets while cutting costs.
“We’re seeing an increased focus
on sustainability from our customers,
the chip manufacturers, because
they’re seeing an increased focus
on this from their customers,” Neil
Garland, Vice President of Marketing
at Edwards Vacuum, said last year
when Ganymede launched. “The
hyperscalers like Google and Apple
are putting pressure on the chip
manufacturers to up their game,
16 | Tuesday, October 13
and that’s because you and I as
consumers expect that from our
consumer electronics providers.”
Ganymede was built to answer that
pressure without the usual tradeoffs.
Historically, Edwards’ iXH pumps
have been the de facto standard for
harsh-duty applications — reliable, but
not the lowest-power option, because
handling nasty byproducts takes torque.
Ganymede, Garland said, removes that
choice: it matches or exceeds the iXH’s
ruggedness on harsh-duty processes
while cutting power consumption by
roughly 50%, in a package 30% smaller
than legacy pumps.
Ganymede at a glance, per
Edwards:
• 50-60% power reduction versus
legacy pumps, lowering operating
costs and carbon emissions.
• 20-25% reduction in nitrogen
(N2) and process cooling water
(PCW) consumption.
• 30% smaller footprint than legacy pumps, addressing shrinking
sub-fab space as multi-chamber
tools proliferate.
• Increased MTBS (Mean Time
Between Service), cutting service
interventions and downtime.
The sustainability case, Garland
said, was built into the product’s
requirements from the start. “The
product that we are launching was
conceived of four or more years ago,
and its goals around sustainability
and CO2 reduction, and its Scope 1,
Scope 2, and Scope 3 targets were
all a key part of the requirement
specification when it was written
some years ago,” he said. “We
could see this coming and we’re
ready for it.” Edwards addresses
Scope 1 by making the pump
smaller and lighter on materials,
he said, while Scope 3 — nearly
90% of a pump’s lifetime CO2
footprint, by Garland’s estimate,
generated once it’s running in a
customer’s sub-fab — is addressed
through Ganymede’s lower power,
nitrogen, and water draw. Scope
2, notably, is the plant building the
pumps: Garland pointed to “the company’s new factory that it’s building
in North America,” almost exclusively hydroelectric-powered, as “a
highly sustainable factory operation
that we’re setting up in New York
state.” That facility is Genesee.
Proven in the field
Garland said Ganymede has already
been benchmark-tested at customer
sites on some of the toughest processes in the fab, including High
Aspect Ratio Processes (HARP) and
PECVD, “where typically pumps last
very short periods of time because of
the temperature requirements and the
byproduct creation.” “All the pumps
in the field have run faultlessly for
far longer than we would’ve expected
in a legacy product,” he said.
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