Data explosion driving demand for Japanese company that moves chips in factories
For close to four decades, one Japanese company has been trusted to move silicon wafers around the factories of the world’s biggest chip manufacturers. Now it is going back to the drawing board and redesigning its ubiquitous overhead conveyors to handle an exponential surge in data use and global chip demand. Daifuku has, over its 85 years in business, gone from ferrying documents between offices and hospital wards to handling the world’s most delicate microelectronics, making the conveyor belts and boxes that zip across the ceilings of modern semiconductor plants. Those containers and rails, which shuttle chips to different parts of the fabrication process at speeds of more than five 5 metres per second, will within years need to bear 100 kilograms — or five times their current load — chief executive Hiroshi Geshiro said. “Many in the industry are optimistic that growth is here to stay, as the amount of data that society must deal with has increased exponentially,” he told Bloomb...