Mosaic Microsystems, located in Rochester, New York, was founded in 2016 to provide a manufacturing solution for inserting glass as a substrate into advanced packaging for next generation products. The core technology is a temporary bond technique that was developed and licensed from Corning, and enables handling and processing of thin glass substrates within a high-volume production environment. The company believes this is a key enabler for insertion of thin glass because their solution employs the use of existing semiconductor processing equipment.
Mosaic’s initial products are thin glass wafers temporarily bonded to a silicon or other type of wafers with or without through glass vias and with or without metallization. The company has recently been awarded multiple SBIR and STTR grants. This includes efforts to collaboratively develop ultra-low loss solutions for next-generation radar arrays with the University of Florida, establish low loss mobile electronically steerable antenna (ESA), heterogeneous integration, and more recently to develop low loss integrated passive devices (IPDs) with commercial partners. The awards are sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) under the AFWERX Agility Prime Open Topic as well as the National Science Foundation. We recently spoke with Christine Whitman, Mosaic’s Chairman and CEO about the company’s history, technology origins, recent and planned milestones, vision, emerging applications, and marketplace dynamics. Mosaic raised $2 million from Corning and BlueSky Capital in May 2020.
MEMS Journal: Who are the key members of your team and what are their backgrounds?
Christine Whitman: We have established a very talented team with extensive backgrounds bringing advanced technology products to market. Several of us, including myself, Andy Peskoe, and Dr. Paul Ballentine worked together previously at CVC, a semiconductor manufacturing equipment company that we grew 10X, completed an IPO in 1999, and ultimately sold to Veeco Instruments. I served as Chairman and CEO, Andy served as a Director and provided legal services through his law firm, GEAB&P, and Paul served as CTO. When we started Mosaic, we had a similar model in mind for growing the business through the development of enabling technology for next generation products.
We also recruited Dr. Shelby Nelson to be our CTO, and she in turn recruited, R&D Director Dr. David Levy. They both have deep technical knowledge with hundreds of issued patents and more than 25 years of experience each in device physics, printed electronics, and surface science. We then recruited Dr. Aric Shorey, VP of Business Development, who most recently spent the last 10 years at Corning where he led an effort to educate the world semiconductor industry on the value of using thin glass substrates for numerous next generation applications. We were also very fortunate to recruit Carol Scalisi as our Senior Production Manager, with enormous experience starting up and running silicon fabs at IBM, Kodak, and ON Semiconductor.
MEMS Journal: What sets your technology apart from other glass suppliers?
Christine Whitman: One key aspect of our solution is that our product can be processed in commercial equipment so we can achieve high yields. Also, our bond is inorganic so there is no outgassing and we can process at more than 450 degrees C. The bond is clean and very thin (less than 1 um), which allows us to maintain good wafer uniformity during processing.
MEMS Journal: Why is glass a good substrate?
Christine Whitman: Glass has been identified as a desirable substrate for MEMS and semiconductor packaging since the early 1990s. And now high frequency signals have become of increasing importance with the growth of 5G. Glass, as you know, is an insulator. This makes it an attractive choice for these high frequency applications due to its very low electrical loss. Glass can be very smooth and can be made thin which enables smaller package sizes. We recently were part of an effort where a glass-based design had almost 30x lower volume than a similar design using organic substrates and equivalent electrical performance.
MEMS Journal: How do you ensure cost-effectiveness and scalability?
Christine Whitman: Advances in glass manufacturing have provided opportunities for cost-effectiveness, due to innovations in the display industry. For example, glass can now be fabricated in sheets greater than 3 meters in size and 100 um or thinner. Thin products can be made without the cost of grinding and polishing and can scale to large formats like 200, 300 mm wafers or even panel size.
MEMS Journal: What are your main application focus areas right now?
Christine Whitman: RF and MEMS applications are our focus currently to support initiatives in 5G and next generation sensors for IoT. These applications benefit from low electrical loss and hermetic packaging. The advances that we are making in support of these applications are also translatable to next generation needs in semiconductor packaging for interposers, optical sensing, bioMEMS, and photonics.
MEMS Journal: How do you plan to leverage your base technology and develop it further into a more comprehensive technical roadmap?
Christine Whitman: Our glass based platform can enable increasingly complex structures. For example, the nature of the temporary bond, as well as the mechanical de-bond approach makes it well-suited for multi-layer glass stacks. This can be leveraged to provide packaging for embedded die with good hermeticity.
MEMS Journal: Have you had strategic advantages by being based in New York State, given all the investments NY is making in this technology segment?
Christine Whitman: Yes -- the NY State ecosystem is very attractive for companies like ours. We are located in Rochester, NY, with its strong optics industry and close proximity to Corning. We are also within driving distance to GlobalFoundries and IBM. NYS has invested heavily in both the semiconductor and photonics industries with R&D infrastructure such as AIM Photonics, CNSE facility in Albany, and other initiatives through NY CREATES. In fact, NY Ventures has recently invested in our seed round.
MEMS Journal: What’s unique about your approach?
Christine Whitman: We make it easy for our customers to build their next generation products with glass by providing them with a choice of integration levels. We can simply provide them with thin glass temporarily bonded to a silicon wafer or another substrate, we can provide them with glass bonded to a wafer with vias, or we can provide them further levels of integration starting with metallization. Our team loves to solve our customers’ tough challenges and looks for solutions that preserve existing capital infrastructure for next generation products. Our vision is to create a glass fab resource for our customers.
MEMS Journal: What are some of the technological challenges you are working through right now?
Christine Whitman: We have demonstrated highly repeatable base processes for 100, 150, and 200 mm substrates. We have recently demonstrated our process on 300 mm wafers and have added dedicated equipment to be able to process larger substrates in volume quantities. This is being qualified currently.
MEMS Journal: Who are some of your investors and partners, and how are they adding value to what you are doing?
Christine Whitman: Corning and BlueSky Capital are our investment partners. Corning is an important technology and glass supplier and Corning’s GM/VP of Advanced Optics, David Velasquez is on our Board. BlueSky Capital is closely related to Samtec and their VP of Advanced Technology, Jeremy Wooldridge, is also on our Board. Both companies have provided us with invaluable guidance and we have a license from Corning and a formal JDA with Samtec. Adding NY Ventures also provides valuable guidance and ecosystem support.
MEMS Journal: What are the main milestones on your agenda for this year?
Christine Whitman: A key goal in is to complete installation of 300 mm equipment and qualify our 300 mm TGV process. There are several customers ready to start 300 mm prototypes. The next key milestone is to secure design wins leading to volume manufacturing with several key customers. We are also working with key partners to demonstrate integration of our products through metallization and device assembly. In some cases, this includes demonstrating the performance in the end application. A good example of this is a mmWave beam steering antenna for satellite communications.
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