HTV invests heavily to expand long-term storage of chips
HTV Halbleiter-Test & Vertriebs GmbH and HTV Conservation GmbH are investing more than one million euros to expand the capacity of their technology for the long-term preservation and storage of semiconductor chips. Adding to this, the companies are expanding the capacity of their test and programming laboratories.
The investment is a direct response to the high demand of its customers for this solution.
"With our investment, we are once again committing ourselves to Bensheim as a business location, securing jobs and once again confirming to our customers that we can react flexibly to their needs as strong partners," says Holger Krumme, Managing Director of HTV and HTVC, in a press release.
Many companies are currently adapting their stocking strategy for semiconductor chips from "just-in-time" to "just-in-case" in order to be able to react to unplanned disruptions in their supply chains by means of flexibly retrievable stocks. For this purpose, the customer chips are stored at HTV under highly secure and monitored environmental conditions and can be retrieved at short notice if required.
"With the HTV conservation process, our customers get the best of "just-in-time" and "just-in-case": maximum availability of the goods without having to implement their own costly warehousing. In addition, we deliver the goods without degradation, even after decades of storage," Ralf Kühne, Head of Analytics and Long-Term Storage at HTV, explains.
One-stop-shop
The company is also expanding its storage and laboratory capacities and hiring new specialists. Through a so-called "fast lane service", users have the opportunity to receive all HTV services much faster.
"Through our high investments in equipment and personnel, we increase our flexibility, which benefits our customers both as a "one-stop-shop" solution and in terms of processing time for individual orders," Kühne adds.
HTV's long-term preservation process makes it possible to store chips, electronic assemblies, displays or entire wafers for up to 50 years while fully preserving their functionality and usability. In particular, the discontinuation of semiconductor chips and components thus loses its explosiveness and product life cycles can be significantly extended by further use of these goods.
During Evertiq Expo Berlin 2023, Fabian Zentner, Failure Analysis Scientist at HTV Conservation GmbH, will hold a presentation on the detection of advanced counterfeits and share current insights from the lab. Mr Zentner will provide data on how counterfeiting has changed over time and how these forgeries are becoming increasingly more difficult to detect.
