Jul 11 2018
SEMICON West is a world forum for photonics. In this interview AZoM talks to Apex Industries, Inc about what products they have on display and what you can expect from them at SEMICON West 2018.
Can you tell me a bit about the company and why you are attending SEMICON West 2018.
Apex Industries has been around for about 20 years and our heritage is working with precision plastics. Our forte is doing several things in this area. We will take sheet & rod material and machine it to specifications that either our customer requested, or we will co-design parts, or design parts and then machine those as well.
In addition, we will undertake the fabrication of assemblies and sub-assemblies. We will take these parts and put them together for a larger tool that OEMs are making.
The third aspect is around integration, and integration in two ways. One, we do a level of integration which is important for purity applications in a cleanroom.With that in mind, we also do a regular form of integration where we will perform integration for electro-mechanical assemblies. We will also do integration where we will do tubing and valving, and we will do point-to-point valve systems and different tube applications for all kinds of panel assemblies, fluid distribution, and chemical management systems.
Can you tell me a bit about the products you are highlighting this year and the benefits they have?
We are trying to tell a little bit of a story to our customer base, and that is we realize that in the industry there is a big need to upgrade bulk delivery and chemical management system aspects,. This is important whether you are a fabrication facility or you are a facility that handles any kind of chemicals. You always need safety with barrel management, where these harsh chemicals are contained.
The first product we are showing is a solution that we have developed, it is our barrel containment cabinet system, we call it the Gemini family of products, and Gemini is really everything from a single container for a barrel, all the way up to four containers for a barrel. We allow for day tanks and totes in the same system. It gives you a variety of capabilities in which to safely contain a lot of chemicals that are used in the daily processes.
The second product we are showing is a product that either compliments that family of barrel cabinets very well, or stands alone, and that is the Lyra valve box. In our valve box we are giving you the capability to develop a number of custom valve solutions that do purity and filtration of chemicals, which are important aspects of managing the chemicals and delivering the chemicals to the fabrication processes.
The next thing we are showing is our Callisto family of wet benches. Wet benches are an important part of the clean room environment where you are cleaning parts and you are also chemically washing them in different chemicals and solvents. You need a well-contained area that can house that sort of environment and safely allow you to do that. All of which still needs to be done in plastic because doing it in metal would result in very bad results, so we are showing how we can safely do that.
The fourth item that we have is; we realize that the importance of safety in managing chemicals, whether they are bulk delivery or chemical management. An important aspect of that is lighting. A lot of cabinets or valve boxes or containers that exist in manufacturing or fabrication facilities today do not have lighting systems in them that are privy to chemically harsh environments. Realizing that, we innovated a lighting system based on LED light strips that are a couple of different sizes. Essentially we are able to create a very sealed lighting system that allows you to mount that lighting system in these different environments and know that it is safe from chemical sprays and solvents and any drips or submersion and you still get an effective lighting source that allows you to safely maintenance, service, or deliver the service you are trying to within those environments.
The products certainly showcase a way that we are trying to help the industry solve some problems, but we are also demonstrating some core competencies and capabilities in terms of fabrication, welding, and being able to safely construct these different types of complex systems using plastics versus metals.
What sets you apart from any others on the market, why should someone choose you?
There are a couple of things we like to talk about. The first one is - we do jobs accurately. What is important to customers if they are going to take the time to design a design with tolerances and very specific specifications, following those and being able to deliver the service as specified is really important.
Another aspect of that is a lot of the requirements we receive are along the lines of copy exactly, which means repeatability in producing the exact same part in the exact same way every time. It requires a level of capability and science to do that. Accuracy is really important in what sets us apart.
The second thing is our turn-around time. We try to be quick in terms of being able to turn the needs of the customer.
Lastly, and just as important, is our standard of quality. Quality is a highly over-used term, but when we talk about quality, we talk about a knowledge gained through years of experience of doing products and services like this for different industries, where we know how a particular material is going to behave and we anticipate the end result and build that into the process from the beginning because of that knowledge and experience. We know that certain things are going to structurally need triple welds versus single welds for rigidity and longevity of the product.
We use that knowledge to bring forth different quality aspects that other vendors are not able to deliver.