Thin Film Technology Corporation

July 1, 1998May 5, 2008 Roger Matz

Photos by Kris Kathmann

True or false: Only in America do brainstorms strike adventuresome folks, who quit their jobs, convert their garages to makeshift factories and grow multimillion dollar companies. False.

It also happens in Japan. Despite that country’s industrial reputation for patient teamwork and polite consensus, entrepreneurial adrenaline and rugged individualism flow just as strongly and swiftly through Japanese veins.

To simplify a complicated story, that’s why North Mankato happens to have an electronics plant called Thin Film Technology, Inc. It’s owned by the immense Susumu Co., Ltd, which was born in the garage of Paul Ozawa, a Japanese physicist. Ozawa’s 1964 brainstorm involved the use of “thin-film” technology, which, by the way, has nothing to do with photographic film or the see-through plastic in which we wrap supper leftovers. It has everything to do with the flow of electricity and data.

Today, Thin Film Technology is a key part of the Susumu World Group, supplying high-speed components to big-name makers of computers, telecommunications and automatic test equipment.

Without the likes of the inventive Ozawa, computers would still be as big, slow and clunky as boxcars. Laptops and tiny cell phones would be no more than concepts. Thin-film technology allows electronic products to continue shrinking in size while achieving lightning speeds.

Computers were in their infancy when Susumu began building resistors 34 years ago. “It was a mystery science in those days, dedicated only for higher-end components like semi conductors for supercomputers,” said Mark Brooks, a vice president of the Susumu’s North Mankato subsidiary. In a sense, it remains a mystery today even to those who regularly use laptops and cell phones without knowing what’s inside. Brooks sometimes finds it difficult to explain this technology to the uninitiated without their eyes glazing over and their minds shutting down in confusion.

“Most people around here think we make photographic film or something like Saran wrap,” he said. But he’s a bundle of enthusiasm and energy as he warms to his topic, often pushing his chair away from a conference table to scribble equations or electronic diagrams with a Magic Marker on a white easel. He moves like an agitated molecule, back and forth between the board and the table. Listening closely on this particular afternoon is a writer who confesses he’s so technologically impaired that his 14-year-old son must program the family VCR. Although Brooks does his best to “dumb it down” for the visitor’s benefit, much of what he says still sounds like scientific gibberish, especially when he mixes microns, angstroms, molecules, nanoseconds and plasma, all in one breath.

The writer hopes to leave this session sufficiently versed to provide readers a Plain English appreciation of what happens in this spotless manufacturing plant, where production workers wear white smocks, special shoes, latex gloves, face masks and baggy cloth hats.

It seems best to start with a basic premise: There’s not room inside computers and other sophisticated electronic equipment for the kind of bulky copper wire that runs through our houses, not even if you slim it down to the diameter of piano wire. Computers still need metal to conduct electricity and data, but it doesn’t have to take the shape of wire. In this North Mankato plant, instead of forming metal into wire, workers do what amounts to vaporizing or atomizing it. Then it’s allowed to rebuild itself, molecule by molecule, producing a thin coating on ceramic sheets. (Hence, thin-film technology which allows electricity and data to race along almost invisible paths of metal.) “The art of combination is getting the right thin film on the right substrate with the right process,” Brooks said. “The whole point of it is miniaturization and reliability.” The process, which involves extreme heat, used to be performed in a Bell jar. Now it’s done in a lock-and-load chamber. The various processes are trade secrets.

There are three common states of matter solid, liquid and gas. Apply enough heat to a solid and it melts to a liquid. Apply more heat and the liquid becomes gas. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. Apply enough heat to the steam or gas and it’s reduced to plasma, a mixture of ions and electrons. It is this plasma which helps material reconstitute itself on the ceramic surface to create the thin pathway for data and electricity. (Think of holding a mirror over a pot of boiling water and watching steam condense on the glass.) “We’re not slapping this metal on with a paint brush, not spraying it on with a gun. It grows molecule by molecule,” Brooks said. (Hours later, the visitor learns his 14-year-old knows about plasma, having just passed an 8th grade science final, but is vague about angstroms, microns and nanoseconds.)

Once a substrate, such as porcelain or ceramic, is coated with material, it can be used to create tiny electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, inductors or delay lines. These tiny devices can be polluted by dust, dirt, human hair, skin oil, saliva or condensed breath, which is why production workers are swathed in protective clothing, latex gloves and masks. “It’s a way of trying to reduce or control particulate contamination,” Brooks explained.

When you see employees dressed like surgeons or surgical nurses, you get the idea that quality control is an important issue. That’s an understatement. More than half a million tiny component parts are shipped monthly from the North Mankato plant, which is ISO 9001-certified, a benchmark of quality. Nothing is trusted to random inspection. “Every single part is performance tested once, sometimes twice, depending on the part,” Brooks said.

When Brooks describes just how thin the metal film is on these parts, you realize there’s not much room for the “tolerances” allowed in less sophisticated manufacturing processes. (If you’re building a picnic table and you drill a hole 1/16th of an inch off center, the picnic table survives your mistake. If a part produced by Thin Film Technology is off by the thickness of a human hair, it’s gross junk.)

Even with trifocals or a microscope, the film Brooks describes borders on nonexistent. “A human hair is 120 microns thick. An angstrom is 10,000 times smaller than a micron,” he said. “Some of our film is only 400 angstroms thick.” (Most computer keyboards can produce the symbol for an angstrom. This is it: Å. You may have seen it and wondered what it was. Now you know. It’s an infinitesimal unit of measurement that Thin Film employees deal with daily.)

Paul Ozawa envisioned the far-reaching effects of this technology when he quit his job and began producing resistors in his garage in Kyoto. “Products based on this technology allow us to develop miniaturized, reliable, precision and low power consumption packages with affordable prices,” Brooks said.

Ozawa’s Susumu Company began mass-producing resistors by the millions, many of them destined for Sperry Univac computers, built in Minneapolis. Sperry Univac, now known as Unisys, is the reason Thin Film Technology was established in North Mankato in 1979. “Customer service is one of the strengths of the Japanese as they wedge their way into the world market. They wanted to start building these resistors closer to Sperry. It cut down on shipping costs and provided quicker feedback if there was an issue or a problem,” Brooks said. The area’s work ethic, stable labor force and the existence of Mankato State University and South Central Technical College were factors in choosing North Mankato, according to Brooks. “They wanted to start with people right out of college and the vo-tech and provide them some specialized training. They wanted to educate the work force step-by-step,” he said.

By 1980, Susumu opened the 55,000 square-foot plant and began training its first employees. Now employment stands at 120, a high point “due to precipitous market conditions through 1997,” Brooks said. Translation: 1997 sales were twice what had been forecast. The company just paved a new parking lot so it can build an 8,000 square foot addition covering the present lot. About 80 of the 120 employees are production workers, while the other 40 are in sales, systems, research and development, engineering and a machine shop.

The North Mankato plant specializes in producing high-speed delay lines. To define a delay line, Brooks goes back to the easel and diagrams the flow of energy through the guts of a computer. Just as a resistor reduces voltage, a delay line “delays a signal without compromising the signal’s integrity,” Brooks explained. But why slow it down?

“The delay is needed by the clock distribution network in a computer. That’s what controls the processing. Sometimes data needs to be delayed so it arrives in the proper sequence,” Brooks said. (It helps here if you imagine a Roman galley rowed by slaves. One man beats on a drum to create a rhythm, so that all oarsmen are pulling simultaneously. If the oarsmen get out of sync, this can send the galley spinning aimlessly. The man with the drum performs the same function as a computer’s clock distribution network.) Brooks talks about timing so precise that it’s measured in nanoseconds, which is a razor-thin fraction of a second. One nanosecond equals .000000001 of a second. (That’s eight zeroes) “Light will travel a foot in a nanosecond,” he observed.

In this discussion of speed, Brooks recalled that IBM’s first PC had a processor speed of 4.77 megahertz. “Then it went to 10, then 33, 50, then 66. Intel has been pushing it and now you can buy a 400 megahertz processor,” he said. “In 2001, we’ll be at 1.6 gigahertz, which is 1,600 megahertz.” With increasingly fast microprocessors in computers, controlling signal speed becomes proportionately more challenging, according to Brooks. “My experience is that when you get to speeds greater than 50 megahertz, the signal starts recognizing that it is moving into a resistor so it tries to reflect off.” Back to the easel he goes to sketch ways to outsmart this energy, “to keep it from going backwards.”

Thin Film Technology is obviously an innovator in delay lines, since the firm holds five patents for this component. The first was granted to Ozawa, the rest to Brooks. That is not surprising, considering the Einstein-like scribbling Brooks has been splattering on the board on this particular afternoon. One might assume that like Ozawa, he’s a physicist, or at least an electrical engineer or advanced mathematician. Not so. He joined Thin Film Technology in 1981, straight out of MSU with a major in business administration. “I was hired here as a technologist, trained by the Japanese and performed some of the first evaporations in the Bell jar,” he said.

“When I was a kid, everybody had a bike, but I had to buy a big telescope. I was fascinated by reading physics textbooks laying around the house from my dad’s college days,” Brooks said. He shrugs off his ability to jump easily from concepts to equations to schematics. “I just kind of have latent, multi-disciplined thinking methods,” Brooks said. His talents fit a big niche at Thin Film. “This is the kind of place where you can be all you can be. We put people where it appears their talents and interests best suit them and the company,” he said.

In seventeen years, Brooks has gone from a technologist to vice president of advanced technology business development. He sits on Thin Film’s Board of Directors, which meets monthly, and also is a member of the senior management team. Hiroo Inoue, a Japanese, is the chief operations officer but he spends about half his time in Japan, helping Susumu deal with a wide range of broad issues. He leaves the North Mankato team to govern by consensus management.

Brooks isn’t sure if there’s a “Susumu culture” in Thin Film because “I’ve been here too long.” He does agree that the various companies he visits possess differing cultures. “If you walk into a Hewlett Packard factory, you sense a partnership attitude. Walk into Sun Microsystems and it’s not at all like HP. It’s very aggressive…get it done! At Intel or Motorola, these people are like they’re covered with acetone and lit on fire. The culture is go, go go, profit, profit.”

What’s the culture at Thin Film?

“The atmosphere here is one of a company that recognizes a customer as important, but we challenge each customer’s needs. We originate solutions for them,” he said. “We’re much less prone to backbite or stab. We’re a high performance engine, well-tuned and hitting on all cylinders.”

At Thin Film, “we’re niche market architects. We’re using thin film as a springboard to creative, innovative design. We’re a successful, high-speed solution provider here in a rural community, but we get out and interface with billion-dollar companies, world-leading companies.” Susumu’s role is growing, and along with it, so is Thin Film’s. “We’re in the midst of becoming a global company, part of the Susumu World Group,” Brooks said.