ANDOVER, MASS.–With an eye toward leveraging its extensive international service organization, GCA Corp. has established a new division that will perform installation, support, training and service functions for other semiconductor production equipment companies.

Known as GCA Integrated Solutions (IS), the new division will try to change the traditional equipment industry bias toward keeping service in-house. By lowering the fixed costs associated with maintaining a service network, said GCA senior vice president for customer operations Ellery Buchanan, the organization can help small and large companies keep customers happy.
Amray Inc. signed on as the division’s first client; GCA IS will service and support Amray scanning electron microscopes in Europe.

“There are benefits to customers and suppliers,” said Mr. Buchanan. “A customer can deal with one service supplier for several systems. And for the supplier, we bring expertise, a stable work force and access to an in-house data collection program we developed” under a Sematech program. GCA has offices across the U.S., and in Britain, France, Germany, Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong; access to General Signal’s Japanese service organization is also available.

“Ongoing service and support has brought down most companies in this industry,” added Michael Wright, a former GCA executive who consulted with GCA on the division’s set-up. “It’s very difficult when you’re a $10 million or $12 million company and Intel or someone says they want you to support equipment at their fabs in Texas and Singapore and Japan. It will take third parties.”
Mr. Wright believes that the equipment industry is ready to move toward the third-party service model that is commonplace in the computer and office equipment industries. “The reality is that the industry is maturing, and that we’re not unlike other industries,” he said, noting that the average GCA service technician has six to 10 years of experience with software, precision mechanics, optics and other systems.

In addition to traditional service, GCA IS will offer paperless documentation services, based on those developed for the company’s XLS family of wafer steppers. Mechanical drawings, schematics, photos and text are combined in a cross-referenced program and displayed on the screen of a personal computer, obviating the need to bring manuals into cleanroom areas.