It’s the Holiday Season. Need to Control Your Stress?
Need to control your stress? We’ve got you covered.
The kSA MOS is a tested and proven solution built to measure and provide feedback for:
– curvature
– growth rate
– reflectivity, and
– STRESS!
kSA MOS is a complete curvature and film stress measurement system and it includes integrated software and imaging tools.
Contact our sales team to find out more.
Quality is Job 1
k-Space earned an “A”—the best possible result—on our recent VDA 6.3 P6 Process Analysis/Production assessment.
Great job all around by our Production, Quality Control, and Operations teams!
The VDA 6.3 standard is widely used by the German automotive industry and is followed by companies that supply German car manufacturers such as Daimler, Volkswagen, and BMW, as well as by non-automotive companies. Find out more here: VDA 6.3 P6 Process Analysis/Production Assessment.
The “Voice of k-Space” Retiring After 20+ Years
Our long-time office manager, Kristine Krueger, is retiring after 20+ years of unparalleled service to our company. Our customers will remember Kris as the voice of k-Space, as she always answered calls with a friendly, professional, and incredibly soothing voice!
But Kris was much more than the first person you talked to when you called us (back in the days when you called instead of sent an email as your first contact). Kris established nearly all of our office procedures, keeping order and organization while our “mad” scientists and engineers ran rampant with ideas and new products. She reined us all in and taught us how to be professionals. And she was even our go-to for proofreading proposals and technical documents, as her writing and grammar skills were the best in the company!
Beyond Kris’s professional contributions, we will miss her positive attitude, appreciation for the finer things in life, and concern for others. Kris organized nearly all of our k-Space holiday parties, and always made them a great time for everyone. She even sang Christmas songs for us at multiple parties – what a lovely voice!
Kris recently moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Tennessee, where she has built a lovely custom home to retire in. But we know her heart is still in Ann Arbor, and we look forward to her visits back home!
k-Space European Representative Closing Doors After 20 Successful Years Working with kSA
RTA Instruments Ltd, led by its founder, Richard Thomson, is officially closing shop at the end of 2023. RTA was instrumental in helping to grow our thin-film metrology business across Europe. RTA’s sales skills and deep knowledge of thin-film deposition and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) in particular, made for an ideal partnership. We have been very fortunate to have RTA as our sales partner for these past 20 years!
Richard first visited our offices here in the US in 2004. He was already representing several companies in the thin-film deposition market. We met again at the 2005 International Conference on MBE in Edinburgh, and not long after we launched the kSA BandiT for temperature measurement. At that time RTA Instruments was formed, and immediately became instrumental in launching kSA BandiT in Europe, where there are 100s of systems in operation today.
Over the next few years RTA visited over 40 customer sites in 20 countries. RTA’s technical expert, Jeff Harris, was instrumental in onsite demonstrations of both kSA BandiT and kSA 400, and the team had a nearly 100% sales success rate. RTA became masters of the kSA MOS system as well, with Dr. Carl Richardson becoming the European expert for this tool. Even as applications expanded from GaAs and InP to include GaN, SiC and other materials, RTA remained keenly aware of both the commercial and scientific needs in the MBE community.
Richard and the RTA team will be sorely missed. Thank you for all you’ve done for k-Space! For more on the RTA story, please see our News item. k-Space will announce our new European distributor in Q1 2024.
Putting Light to Work
Need some sun? Join k-Space at Intersolar North America, January 17-19, in sunny San Diego. See first-hand how our innovative industrial metrology solutions help solar panel manufacturers build better, faster, and safer — all while saving on production costs.
And you can go here for a list of all events k-Space will attend. We love showing people the value of metrology! For example, we recently demo’d our thin-film metrology tools at the 2023 MRS Fall Meeting. And we were a sponsor of the DGKK/DEMBE Workshop, held at the University of Stuttgart. The focus there was on topics related to the epitaxy of III-V semiconductors.
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