Exyte: Clean Rooms for the World – Economy

Clean, keep cleaning. First with big suckers, then also wet. “Otherwise,” says Wolfgang Büchele, “you can never get the dust out.” Even very little dust would be catastrophic in the production of semiconductors. In their clean rooms, one cubic meter of air contains on average only a single particle. So Büchele has the cleaning crews come over again and again so that he can give his customers their clean room the way they need it: dust-free.

Büchele directs a true Hidden Champion, a company that hardly anyone outside the industry knows, but which has little competition worldwide: Exyte plans and builds clean rooms and other special production environments worldwide. With the exception of Japan and South Korea, the medium-sized company based in Stuttgart is represented in all markets.

But why do global companies come to Exyte of all places when they need a clean room for the production of chips or a super-dry room for the manufacture of car batteries? Well, systems like those for chips, medicines or batteries are not just halls with a somewhat special inner workings. First and foremost, they are: an incredibly complex planning task.

Reverse onion principle

“We’re proceeding according to the reverse onion principle,” says Büchele, an experienced manager who previously managed the gas group Linde. “Planning and implementation overlap.” This means that construction is already underway, even if the plans for many details are not yet complete. For example, it is about where and how which cranes are set up, so that on the one hand the construction can be completed as quickly as possible, but on the other hand the giant machines do not obstruct each other or interfere with the transport of materials.

Or about the machines that will one day work in the building. What are they, and in what order should Exyte’s experts list them? And: “How much future should be built in?” says Büchele, i.e.: to what extent do possible future expansions already have to be considered? “The customer specifies the process.” In principle, it is determined what is to be produced in a plant, and then the building is built around it, so to speak.

Exyte currently does around 80 percent of its business with semiconductor manufacturers. Among other things, the Stuttgart-based company is building the expansion of the Infineon plant in Dresden. According to Büchele, smaller projects take 18 months, and large ones sometimes three years. It is about construction sums between 500 million and five billion.

Many parts of the future buildings will not be manufactured on site, but by contractors and then assembled, “comparable to Lego,” as Büchele says. “Our teams know what to install and when.” This also applies to the huge facilities, inside which the almost incomprehensible processes that produce the smallest structures in silicon discs take place.

Set up huge machines vibration-free – “not everyone can do that”

The leading manufacturer is the Dutch company ASML, one of their machines weighs more than 100 tons and several cargo planes are needed to transport it. In the fab, as the semiconductor factories are called in technical jargon, they have to be set up vibration-free. “Not everyone can do that,” says Büchele. Exyte is also working with ASML to create an even cleaner clean room inside the machine. Every particle of dust really counts here, because the special systems use ultraviolet light and matrices to mark structures on silicon wafers, which are then etched away in further work steps. It’s a matter of nanometers, i.e. millionths of a millimeter – the most modern high-performance chips have now reached single-digit nanometer processes.

In Arnstadt, Thuringia, Exyte set a European record. There is the largest clean room on the continent, the humidity in it is less than 0.1 percent. For comparison: In the Atacama Desert in South America, which is considered the driest in the world, there is a humidity of around six percent. The particle density and air pressure are also checked in the room. It is used by the Chinese market leader CATL, which produces lithium-ion battery cells for the European market here.

Delivery problems and staff worries

What worries Exyte, and what keeps throwing plans off balance, are supply issues. If parts don’t arrive on time, all the beautiful plans of the experts get mixed up, and a talent for improvisation is required. “The customer is breathing down the necks of the project managers,” says Büchele, “and when we talk about delays of months, I get a call from the customer too.”

Büchele is more worried about another problem: the lack of skilled workers. “We are looking for mechanical and electrical engineers, but also business economists, planners and logisticians who organize the material flow.” Exyte currently employs around 9,000 people, and it will soon be 10,000 because business is going well. The problem, of course, is that new employees fresh out of university can hardly take on a project.

This requires many years of experience because the business is complex and sometimes unconventional solutions are needed. For a project in Asia, the company flew in workers from a neighboring country on a charter plane because of an acute shortage. The newcomers from the university would first have to work with experienced project managers for a while in order to learn from their experience.

The biggest obstacle from the point of view of the Exyte boss is the home office. Many wish it, but in the jobs that the company offers, you also have to spend a lot of time away from home. “But everyone has 25 excuses why they don’t want to go to the construction site.”