F&K Delvotec in Munich, a well-known manufacturer of wire bonders, is happy to reap the benefits of a diversification strategy away from a pure semiconductor business and towards other market segments which are less prone to demand cycles. The primary targets which were identified are solar cells and battery modules for e-vehicles, and the company developed a purpose-built wire bonder with an extremely large working area. This new bonder G5-XL boasts a gigantic working area of almost one square meter, allowing it to bond large solar cell panels or entire battery modules in a single pass. This simplifies the module or panel design greatly. Since the beginning of this year, the new bonder already found favor with several customers from these two market segments. President Dr. Farhad Farassat is happy about his felicitous timing: “In the last two years we already had a huge success in the marketplace with our newly developed double-head bonder G5–2, when manufacturers of power semiconductors practically snatched the bonders off our production line. We delivered and installed well over 100 systems within 18 months! But in the last few months we found that the standard semiconductor business is losing steam again, showing that we are entering the next market cycle. So we are very happy to see the market for solar and e-vehicle applications flourishing the way it does which more than compensates the loss.”
According to Dr Farassat, the recipe for success is mainly the intelligent platform strategy exploiting many proven components such as drives, controls and bond-heads which are already used in the prize-winning basic G5 wire bonder in many hundred installations. Reliability and bond quality are, so to speak, family traits shared by the new members of the wire bonder family.
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