As the chip manufacturing industry continues to expand in New York, one company in Saratoga Springs is hoping to carve out its own niche — silicon carbide production. Free Form Fibers has been producing ceramic matrix composites in Saratoga Springs since 2008 for use in airplanes, and last month it was awarded a $925,000 grant from the Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Accelerator program. In an interview with WAMC, CEO Shay Harrison says his company is ready to expand production capabilities.
So, if you think about a ceramic, think about like a dinner plate or a coffee cup you have at home. If you drop that on the floor, what's it going to do? It's going to it's going to shatter into 1000 pieces. And that's obviously not good on a on a commercial jet engine. And so, the what the function of the fibers in the ceramic matrix is to give the component the part behavior that's more like a metal in the sense of, if you were to drop it on the ground, it would dent and not shatter. And so that was what the company was focused on, was in the aviation space, for these CMCS, or ceramic matrix composites, making fiber, trying to make fiber materials that were needed in that in that space, because we have been, you know, around for quite a while. You know that the use cases for these types of composites has broadened to include into the nuclear industry, into Department of Defense applications, and so, you know, broadly speaking, the company has been working on making fibers for composites, where we saw an opening with regard to next generation semiconductor, which is where this grant came out of, if we make a terrible fiber, one that's no good mechanically, would never be useful in a in a composite, but it's very we can make them. I'll call them, relatively speaking, much, much larger and in a quicker in a quicker manner, quicker rate, we can actually break those fibers apart, turn them into a powder. And that powder is what is used as the starting raw material to make these next generation semiconductor wafers out of what's called Silicon carbide. Silicon carbide doesn't melt, so it's very, a very different process from what, say, Global Foundries uses in terms of working with silicon wafer chips, you can melt silicon and form it into these really tall, big, you know, 500 millimeter pools with silicon carbide. It doesn't melt. And so you need a very different process to make that starting raw material. And that's where we saw an opening. Because really the number one advantage of what of our technology is that it makes a really high purity material. And purity drives performance. Purity is what you need, obviously, in semiconductors, so that every time you open up your laptop, you know, you hit the button on your iPhone, it works.
Harrison says the nearly $1 million in federal funding will help Free Form Fibers solidify the relationships it has been building with incoming chip manufactures.
We have relations and conversations with folks, the large manufacturers in this space. And we're making that argument that one, our material, that the purity matters. The economics of making it matter. Part of the point of this grant is to also do what's called a life cycle analysis, which includes evaluation of the energy costs and the greenhouse gasses emitted by the process, in comparison to the standard way that this powder is made now. That technology was developed in the 1880s so, you know, it isn't the most energy efficient. It doesn't really minimize the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses that get emitted from it. So, this grant is really going to help us, one, developed data that that delivers that story to the manufacturers. And two, we're actually partnered with several important players in this space that can, I think, open up relationships in the industry. In particular, Penn State has the only academic program in the United States, laboratory R&D program in silicon carbide semiconductors, and they're a prime collaborator in the program. So, we see this as a way to one, generate really important data and bolster our case for why our material is good is, you know, useful for this technology and in this market, but also really strengthen the bond so that we can get to, so that we can get to, you know, commercial opportunities with the manufacturers.
Free Form Fibers boasts that its production method for silicon carbide is a new approach that can provide the necessary parts for semiconductor manufacturing at a lower environmental impact.
The only emission from our, gas emission, from our process is hydrogen. Because of the we use precursor gasses to make the material that's our only, that's our only raw material into the process. And so, we can, actually, we don't do it now, but we have, you know, we have mapped out what we would do as we get to a higher volume scale of production. We would just capture that hydrogen and, you know, resell it to the same market that somebody like plug power is selling to in the hydrogen market. So that's the only, that's the only gas that's being emitted. And the other aspect of the economic case is the energy usage. Our technology is called laser driven chemical vapor deposition, or LCVD. Our lasers plug into the wall, right? They're just 120-volt outlet lasers. So, we're not talking about, you know, needing, you know, 1000s of kilowatt hours to drive our process. It's a very low energy usage process relative to some of these big industrial cases where your industrial processes where you're, you know, you're using very large electrodes and driving, you know, very high currents to get the same kind of raw material made.
With billions of federal dollars pouring into upstate New York for chip fabrication, Harrison says Free Form Fibers is positioned to help that growth. Micron has been awarded $100 billion in federal funding to build a series of semiconductor chip plants near Syracuse over the next two decades. And New York’s Capital Region will host the first National Semiconductor Technology Center in Albany as GlobalFoundries is building a second chip fab at its global headquarters in Malta.
We're located in an old cereal box manufacturing plant, and there is plenty of space for us to expand our capacity, to be able to, you know, deliver the kind of quantities that's going to be needed. You know, every time we look at market forecast for silicon carbide, silicon carbide-based semiconductor materials over the next five years through 2030 it seems like every six to nine months that number is increased by a third or a half-expected market value. So, you know, we can see where thousands of kilograms of this material is going to be needed over the next five years. And so, we want to be part of that growth. We want to, we need to, you know, grow from our capacity standpoint, and so all this kind of plays into what we're trying to do as a company in terms of our commercialization process and establishing ourselves as a as a prime supplier to these manufacturers. So, we're hoping to, you know, grow and become a reliable supplier to these chip fabricators in the silicon carbide space. And I mean, as you said, there's probably not a better place in the country to be located, and also in terms of timing, right?