Medical Murray opens 18,000 ft² more

Medical Murray, North Barrington, Ill (medicalmurray.com) opened a second facility to manufacture medical devices. The new 18,000-ft² facility has two ISO class 7 clean rooms fully equipped with injection-molding machines, braiders, custom catheter forming equipment, bonding, sealing, packaging, and inspection equipment. The new facility is ISO 13485-certified and accepts short-run production and ongoing routine volume production. The company specializes in custom catheters and components, complex disposables, and implantables for vascular, surgical, and urology markets.

On-Demand Maintenance Support

KMC Systems Inc, Merrimack, NH, (kmcsystems.com), a designer and manufacturers of medical devices, and PEAK-Service GmbH, Darmstadt, Germany, (peak-service.com), an after-sales service company, have formed PEAK-Service USA LLC, Merrimack, NH, (peak-services-usa.com). The joint venture lets medical device and instrumentation OEMs and end users outsource maintenance services to a U.S.-based team of field engineers.

PEAK-Service USA lets OEMs expand maintenance services and enhance customer support without hiring support staff. The company's nationwide contracted services lets smaller OEMs provide national field service, and also complement existing service teams of larger organizations.

Capabilities include on-site support, including repair, installation, validation, installation qualification, operational qualification, spare-part fulfillment, inventory management and loaner pool management, retrofits, upgrades, and product-improvement assistance.

Taiwan lab gains ultra-thin wafer bonding

EV Group (EVG), Tempe, Ariz. (evgroup.com) and Brewer Science Inc., Rolla, Mo. (brewerscience.com) installed an EVG 500 series wafer-bonding system at Brewer Science's Taiwan applications lab in Hsinchu Science Park. Statements by both companies reflect “a commitment to speed commercialization” of through-silicon via (TSV) technology and high-performance, power-efficient electronic devices. In December 2007, EVG and Brewer Science announced ultra-thin wafer handling capability for TSV creation for 3D chip stacking. This joint program continues developing ultra-thin wafer handling equipment for leading-edge CMOS image sensors, DRAM, and integrated devices manufacturers requiring wider temperature range, thin wafer etching, passivation, and metallization.

“By leveraging Brewer Science's facility and equipping it to handle temporary bonding demonstrations, it allows us to have faster cycle times and a more centralized hands-on lab to collaborate closely to adapt the process to Asia-Pacific customers' requirements,” says EVG Business Development Manager Stefan Pargfrieder.

Mark Privett, product manager of bonding materials at Brewer Science Inc, says, “Adding EVG's 500 series bonder to the laboratory in Taiwan will help accelerate the adoption of TSV and 3DP technology in the region. Adding the bonder to the lab also allows lets us provide training for the region's engineers.”

Advancing software testing and verification

LDRA, Wirral, UK (ldra.com), provider of software testing equipment, says it has a way to combine software testing with verification requirements. The method captures required information for software development projects and simplifies constructing a requirements traceability matrix. The matrix is being integrated into TBreq, the portion of the LDRA tool suite devoted to requirements-driven testing. Doing so lets developers:

• Establish a baseline of selected software requirements from which development and testing will begin

• Delegate tasks associated with each requirement to members of development team

• Associate source code with each requirement, thereby automating creation of trace relationships

• Refine source code mappings to a level of class or individual functions

• Verify requirements according to a wide variety of analyses and tests performed on mapped code

• Link requirements, test cases, and code coverage results in a unified view of all testing levels.