ACME Advanced Materials, Inc Announces First Commercial Production of 4″ SiC Wafers in Microgravity
“ACME Advanced Materials, Inc. today announced the successful commercialization of its process to produce large quantities of low loss, electrically defect free (EDF) Silicon Carbide (SiC) wafers in a microgravity environment.”
Made in space, Albuquerque Journal
“We take crappy wafers, the lowest grade we can buy, and use a microgravity environment to turn them into what the industry would call prime ‘A’-grade wafers,” said ACME President and CEO Rich Glover. “We call them ‘S’-grade, or ‘space-grade’ wafers. They’re better wafers than you can get on the market today, and at a better price.” Since last spring, the company has been sending batches of low-grade wafers for conversion to high-grade on contract flights in Texas, although details of the suborbital launches remain confidential. “We signed a three-year agreement with a flight partner,” Glover said. “We’ve flown monthly since April.”
Keith’s note: This company (without a website – at least one that I can find) declines to say how they obtain microgravity conditions by “flying monthly”. It is either parabolic flight, suborbital rockets, or orbital spaceflight. Or have they discovered a new way to “fly” and get “microgravity”? I asked. They won’t say. Its is certainly their IP and its up to them whether they want to share it. But they have suddenly tweeted a lot about why they are not talking.

More tweets below.

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17 replies on “Playing 20 Questions With A Microgravity Company”

  1. In their defense, they don’t particularly need to be taken seriously by NASA per se. They do need to be taken seriously by semiconductor manufacturers and developers. If the product is good, the methods are less material.

  4. Did some looking around, found Glover posting various places to promote the press release but not much else… except this SEC info.
    Dunno if you want to let this out of moderation or not, I’m not trying to be stalkerish, but this is a corporation, so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with looking into it.

    Dunno if anyone smarter than me can glean anything useful from this.

    http://www.secinfo.com/d1GQ…

    2. “Total Offering Amount $1,631,906 USD
      Total Amount Sold $1,131,902 USD
      Total Remaining to be Sold $500,004 USD”

      Not bad for an initial investment.

  6. I’ve been waiting a lot longer for any substantiated claims about microgravity for crystal growth. It’s been used to justify the ISS for decades with about as much to show for it.

  7. it’s a lot cheaper and easier to maintain a twitter feed than to host and run your own website.

  8. They do have a web site, ACMEADVANCEDMATERIALS.COM

    It’s registered at GoDaddy.com, but they used domainsByProxy to hide the identity of the registrant.

      1. Agreed. I use it myself. I had in mind more that it wasn’t a possible source of additional information about the company. Sometimes you can find some additional leads that way.

  9. Unencumbered by the facts, my guess is they are using a Texas vomit comet like G-Force-One

    http://www.sportations.com/…

    suborbital launches…. “We’ve flown monthly since April.”

    Maybe not. The patent discusses suborbital sounding rocket flights with sufficient time ~20 minutes.

  11. Apparently a precut wafer can be heated to an annealing temperature and then cooled pretty rapidly. But whether this really eliminates defects, let alone at competitive cost, is anybody’s guess. Defect-free SiC wafers are already commercially available, of course, they are just more expensive, and there is no stampede to use them, so the cost of any microgravity technology is critical. We have to get beyond the ancient myth that “only” microgravity can produce defect-free semiconductors. This was not even true back in the Seventies. That said, the primary application of SiC in very high power switching devices requires (unlike typical integrated circuits) very large single elements without defects.

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