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And how exactly does that happen? Siegfried Seidl, MAS, who has been with the company since the beginning and is now the owner, explains: ‘At 25 micrometres, or 25 thousandths of a millimetre, these wire connections are not even half as thick as a woman’s hair. A wire like this is attached to the contact point on the silicon chip by friction welding. And it’s just as simple as it sounds: the wire is rubbed onto the contact point and welded to it. We call this bonding.’ Of course, it’s not quite that simple: in order for the two partners to form a firm bond, their atomic lattices must come into direct contact, and the machines from the industrial line, which are called wire bonders, do this with the right combination of pressure, temperature and a friction movement that runs with ultrasound so that it happens quickly enough.
Why this is happening in this tranquil town on the River Inn has a long history. Until the 1990s, there was an AEG-Telefunken factory where semiconductor components were manufactured. The final production step was contacting the chips with wires, i.e. wire bonding, using equipment from the Munich-based company Delvotec. When Telefunken then decided to relocate this production to the Far East due to its labour-intensive nature, many employees, including Siegfried Seidl, were left without jobs. The specialists could have been put to good use in Munich at Delvotec, but luring an Innviertler away from home was hopeless. Dr Farhad Farassat, who had taken over Delvotec himself in a management buyout at the time, recounted this in a witty retrospective during the anniversary celebration in front of a good hundred guests from business and local politics. What to do? Quite simply, the company was brought to the Innviertel region and a second production facility was set up in the then newly established Techno-Z. That was in October 1994, and the first three employees shared a room, but it soon became too small. The first new development, a semi-automatic wire bonder, was such a hit on the market that the company moved into its own building diagonally opposite just five years later, and this has been extended several times to date, so that almost 50 people now produce devices for bonding and testing.
The machines are sold all over the world, almost 2,500 of them. F&S BONDTEC is therefore a true ‘hidden champion’. They are particularly favoured in research, development and pilot production, and the customer list is a veritable who’s who of the industry. So it’s no wonder that the wire bonds from the Braunau machines appear virtually everywhere. Johann Enthammer, Managing Director Technology since this year, proudly explains: ‘The solar panels on the Airbus satellites are manufactured with our bonders. They fly around in space at a distance of 36,000 kilometres. And at the other extreme are drill heads in which sensors work with wire bonds and which drill several thousand metres into the depths.’
Of course, this also raises the question of the future. Further growth doesn’t look bad, as the local technical college continues to produce talented graduates and, above all, female graduates. This is emphasised by Miriam Seidl, M.Sc., the owner’s daughter, who also joined the management team this year as COO. Together with her two siblings, she completes the family business. She is proud of the 30% quota of women, which is quite high for an engineering company, and even more so of the fact that there is an equal proportion of women on the management board.
The success of the enterprising mechanical engineers continues, and even in the current difficult times, the order books are full. The Austrian Chamber of Commerce presented Siegfried Seidl with a special anniversary gift: Klemens Steidl, head of the WKO district office, presented him with the WKO silver business medal.
