Chamber fixtures and insulating components for a semiconductor-equipment maker — tight flatness, mirror-EDM finishing, Zeiss CMM verification. Anonymized project walkthrough.
| Customer | Semiconductor equipment manufacturer (anonymized) |
| Parts | Vacuum-chamber fixtures, insulating spacers and brackets |
| Materials | 17-4PH stainless, PEEK |
| Key tolerances | Flatness on sealing faces; ±0.003 mm feature grade |
| Processes | CNC machining, precision grinding, mirror EDM |
| Verification | Zeiss CONTURA CMM, FAI per run, report per shipment |
Inside a process chamber, materials fight you in opposite directions. The 17-4PH fixture parts need strength and corrosion resistance, with sealing faces flat enough that a gasket actually seals after thermal cycling. The PEEK insulators must hold geometry without the thermal expansion behavior of metal — and both material families need different cut, clamp and finish strategies. On top of that, any burr or handling mark inside a chamber becomes a particle problem.
Stainless fixtures were rough-machined, stress-relieved, then finish-machined and ground on surface grinders to bring the sealing faces into flatness without locking in machining stress. PEEK parts were cut with sharp, high-clearance tooling and controlled clamping pressure to avoid creep around the features. Edge breaks and deburr were specified and inspected, not assumed. Interior finish on one eddy-current-sensitive feature called for mirror EDM — the same in-house electrical-discharge capability we use for mold work. Everything was verified on the Zeiss CONTURA CMMs, with FAI reports per run.
The customer consolidated both material families with one supplier who could hold metal flatness and plastic geometry under the same quality system — one inspection standard, one report format, one logistics flow. Reorder batches run against approved FAI data, so new releases start from a known process instead of a fresh discovery exercise.
Send your chamber drawings — quote in 4 hours →
More: surgical robotics components · mold from PO to T1 · parts gallery
