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Ahead of Microelectronics UK, taking place on 29-30 September, Daniel Johnstone, managing director at EMU Technologies, talks about the opportunities and challenges across water handling equipment and the wider semiconductor industry.

Tell us about your role and what EMU Technologies does - what problems are you solving, and for whom?

I am the managing director of EMU Technologies, heading up the commercial, financial and operational departments of the business. Working with our CEO, David Hyland, and Engineering Director, Robert Niedzwiedz, I also ensure our strategic goals are met with the customer always in focus!

Our customers are global semiconductor device and substrate manufacturers, with a focus on 100mm, 150mm and 200mm markets. We manufacture a complete range of standalone open cassette and SMIF wafer handling systems, including wafer sorters, batch ID readers, batch transfers, batch aligners and wafer inspection systems – with over 1500 installations worldwide.

In recent years we have diversified the business to offer factory automation solutions – working with semiconductor-focused OEMs in Asia to offer automated material handling systems/E84 Systems (EDSN Taiwan) and autonomous mobile robots (Castec International) to our European customers.

Alongside these well-established product lines, we have crossover systems like Hexagon Sorters which can run in fully automated wafer fab environments with a GEM300 interface and Preceptor Batch ID Reader, which combines SMIF Load Ports, Co-Bots, Batch ID Reading and GEM300 to offer a fully automated, super-fast wafer tracking solution in a “Lights Out” semiconductor manufacturing environment.

What are the defining technical and operational pressures facing your sector right now - and where do you see the industry underestimating the challenge?

Capacity is a big pressure today and even we are seeing resulting price increases in our supply chains, particularly in Industrial PCs. The semiconductor industry is at the forefront of the AI revolution, which has such huge potential over the next decade, but this potential is clearly putting pressure on industrial capacity worldwide.

I can see our customers, especially those working in the AI supply chain, are adding capacity. I hope at the appropriate speed. What I would like to see is maximum engagement with the entire supply chain to kit out or update a wafer fab. EMU’s products sit between process steps so can sometimes become an after-thought in fab/production planning. Greater engagement with foresight of requirements really helps us to provide on-time solutions that meet the requirements of the process.

Which application areas or end markets present the strongest near-term opportunity for your technology, and what is driving that demand?

We see the strongest near-term opportunities in floor level fab automation and we think we have a great, industry proven product line with Castec. Capacity demand is forcing existing and new build facilities to maximise throughputs and yields to their limits. Integrating floor level automation keeps product constantly flowing and is a big help to addressing this.

On our wafer handling product line, we are integrating new external technologies to offer wafer process steps with our automated handling. The next product release, planned for November 2026, is the Hexagon Lasermarker – a fully automated machine with wafer lasermarking using a Keyence UV Lasermarker. The equipment can lasermark 75mm-200mm wafers in SEMI OCR Font, Barcodes, QR Codes and more. Although this is an established industry process step, we are trying to disrupt the market with a competitively priced, high throughput system built on our 25+ years of fab equipment experience.

Which emerging technologies or engineering approaches are you backing for the next three to five years - and what would it take for them to cross from promising to mainstream?

I would like to expand our AI Wafer Inspection product line to include an ultra-fast, fully customisable, die level wafer inspection system – built into the Hexagon Sorter platform.

We have a manually loaded system qualified in our UK Manufacturing centre, utilising a wafer chuck on X/Y Table, a Microscope with camera attachment and a basic software platform to teach patterns for inspection – with a Pass/Fail result for each die generated.

The next step for us is to industrialise the design and integrate it on a hardware and software level with Hexagon Sorter.

This process can be expedited if we can find end users to come on the journey with us! We will certainly be floating the concept to our visitors at Microelectronics UK.

Events like Microelectronics UK bring together engineers, researchers, and industry decision-makers under one roof. How valuable is that kind of in-person concentration of expertise to you and your team?

On one level it’s a fantastic opportunity for my team to speak with new and existing end users to understand current requirements and planning.

On a deeper level, it’s an invaluable opportunity for everyone on the team to investigate and learn what is happening in the industry, where we are going, how we are going to get there and ultimately how EMU can positively contribute.

What do you want engineers and technical buyers to come away understanding about EMU Technologies after speaking with you at the show - and what conversations are you expecting to have on the floor?

I am hoping people we engage with at Microelectronics UK come away knowing we are a very experienced but dynamic organisation, ready to meet their challenges with our existing product lines but also prepared to customise to any unique requirements.

Alongside discussions with engineers and technical buyers, I am interested in value-add solutions we can integrate with our product lines, so I will certainly be looking out for these at Microelectronics UK.

Is there a leader, engineer, or mentor who has shaped how you approach your work - and what is the most enduring lesson you took from them?

In 2013, I was given a huge opportunity to lead EMU Technologies with the remit to transform the business from offering service and technical support to manufacturing our own product line. EMU’s CEO, David Hyland, gave me that opportunity and has supported me throughout the journey. But he’s also given me autonomy when it was and is needed – I will forever be grateful to David for the opportunity.

And I am lucky to work with some of the world’s most brilliant engineers, who work in extreme semiconductor manufacturing environments and communicate those demands to me in a collaborative way. The expectations of EMU’s solutions are rightfully high, myself and our dedicated team always strive to ensure we meet or exceed our customer requirements.

What does the next 12 months look like for EMU Technologies, in terms of product direction, capability expansion, or where you are focusing development resource?

We are currently getting a Castec iOperator AMR set up in our manufacturing centre and we are very much looking forward to inviting our customers to EMU UK HQ for in person demonstrations of this powerful product. We will have robotics compatible with open cassettes, cassette boxes, SMIF Pods or FOUPS so we can present the iOperator for a range of use cases.

Towards the end of 2026, we are installing the first Hexagon Lasermarker at a major UK IC manufacturer. We are confident this product will perform well and we’re keen to increase installations in 2027.

We moved to a 5000 sq ft location in 2022 which has helped us to increase our production output significantly – we want to address our customer’s challenges with top tier automation solutions and keep this production space busy for this year and beyond!