Nearfield Instruments has been nominated for the Tech Hero Award. The company makes pioneering machines in conjunction with software for the semiconductor industry, which deploys these solutions for fault detection and metrology. “We have gone from startup into scale-up mode in two years,” says IT manager Ahura Qavami Tehrani.
What is the biggest task facing your organization?
“Let me first explain briefly what it is that we do. We build measurement and inspection equipment for the semiconductor industry, so we measure what happens on the wafers of electronic components such as CPUs. We measure height, width, and length in nanometers or less than a nanometer. Yes, that’s really tiny.
The semiconductor industry has used metrology for years, but our technology uses atomic force microscopy with a microscopic needle instead of an electron or photon beam. The tip of the needle is no larger than a few molecules; it comes very close to the surface of the wafer. That’s why we call it undestructive technology. Older technology uses photons or electrons, for example, but they can cause damage. Our technology does not and we can really make better measurements. Existing techniques give 2D results; our machine gives results in 3D and of higher quality.
Our challenges: we want to achieve dominance in metrology in a few years. In terms of technology, we can do it. Our machines are ready for the future. We have the best engineers and thus successfully built the first machines, but we now need to build a large number of them of equal quality. And each machine comes at a different point in the manufacturer’s line, so each machine is unique.
Another challenge is the use of AI, which is imperative for us. For example, each measurement produces about 1 terabyte of raw data. After processing, it’s about 4 terabytes. Analyzing takes a lot of computing power. AI can help us achieve better and faster results in this area. We can also use AI to improve our production effectiveness in different business units. My first challenge for the coming year is to build the best infrastructure to collect all the data and to have one source of truth.
“My role has slowly gone from firefighter to a situation where I define the processes, policies, and infrastructure needed to grow.”
Then there’s security. We are now at the ISO 27001 level, but getting to this level takes a lot of energy and time. We not only have to maintain that level, but we have to go further because the semiconductor industry is so advanced, and other companies and countries want to steal new technological knowledge. So we have to properly protect our IP and our knowledge from attacks.
We have growing pains because our growth means we are always dealing with change management. People have to adapt themselves to a new way of working. That’s another challenge for the time ahead.”
What is your approach as a leader?
“We didn’t have a foundation; we had to build it first. That takes a lot of energy and time. One should not look at what a company looks like two, or three years from now. I have to look at what the company will look like in five, or ten years. Based on that vision, I had to create a roadmap, and a strategy to determine the components we need in five years. My role as a leader has slowly gone from firefighter to a situation where I define the processes, policies, and infrastructure that are needed to grow.
You have to look not just at daily problems or issues, but also at where you want to be in five or ten years. I’ve laid the groundwork, but the roadmap is flexible. We have a super agile team, we look at all the processes, especially since we have to build the [software for the] processes.
A startup has few defined processes. There are few policies and processes for IT, security, for all kinds of things. I help build not only the IT infrastructure but also help our HR to hire better people. And I help our supply chain management and logistics as well, so they have a better overview of their processes. Collaboration with all business units is important. We look at their challenges every week.”
What are you proud of?
“I’m proud we were able to achieve all this in such a short time, where most companies take two to five years to make a transition like this. Usually, IT is the bottleneck to the processes. We are proud that we can help the other business units achieve their goals. I am also proud that within a year we managed to get our security to level five. Not just in technology, but culturally. We are doing more than the ISO standard requires.”