Medical x-ray firm opens MEMS fab in South Korea
Nano-X Imaging Ltd. (Neve Ilan, Israel) has opened a special wafer fab line in Yongin, South Korea to make MEMS for its xray source.
The company, founded in 2011 and now traded on Nasdaq, is developing a digital x-ray source to reduce the cost of medical x-ray imaging, known as the Nanox-Source. This is used inside the Nanox-Arc 3D medical imaging system.
The company has opened its own chipmaking facility which is now operational. The company expects to scale to full production by mid-2022. To complement this Nano-X has been establishing an operational assembly line at its Israeli facility to prepare for shipments of the Nanox-Arc system.
Yongin close to SK Hynix
The Yongin facility occupies 12,000 square meters with a 1,200 square meter clean room. The facility performs semiconductor fabrication practices, including photolithography down to 0.2-micron using a krypton fluoride (KrF) scanner, electrochemical metal etching, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and physical vapor deposition (PVD) of thin films, dry etching, wet and chemical etching, chip inspection and testing in vacuum.
The Nanox-Source is a semiconductor chip that replaces the filament in the analog X-ray tube, similar to a light-emitting diode (LED) source, and has an on/off toggling feature designed to reduce the duration of each operation. As the Nanox X-ray digital source maintains a low temperature, there is no heat associated with electrons exiting the chip as compared to analog X-ray sources. The X-ray tube’s expected energy range is 20kV to120kV and it is small in size and light in weight.
“Our new fabrication plant is an important part of our strategy of vertical integration to ensure we can deliver a global, connected medical imaging solution with the potential to meaningfully expand delivery of healthcare,” said Erez Meltzer, CEO of Nano-X, in a statement.
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