company profile Hiden Analytical
Before we moved,we had a customer in testing a system. He didn’t have room to sit during an acceptance test
Researchers at GEC bought Hiden’s first product and sales followed at TI in Cambridge and at Herriot Watt University. Hindsight shows that these first customers did not need to have concerns relating to the reliability of their purchases – Hiden has recently had one of its RGAs from the 1980s back in, but for calibration, rather than repairing a fault.
Like many start-ups, getting the first product out of the door took longer than expected. In this case, it took 15 months, with the cash injection providing welcome relief to a balance sheet that had started to look rather precarious.
More success followed. “In 1984, we had our first order for a large system, and that got us out of the overdraft situation,” say Neale. During this time, the company had to cope with interest rates on its borrowing peaking at 18 percent. It weathered the storm, and by 1988 it had fully repaid its loan.
Growing the business To grow the company, Neale took on school leavers on the government-backed Youth Training Scheme. This programme has been widely criticised for the low wages paid to youngsters, who would find themselves out of a job at the end of the scheme.
However, that’s certainly not happened to some of the teenagers that Neale took on: Three are still with the company today. They form part of a diverse workforce that includes many staff with a strong academic background – about one-in seven of those at Hiden have a PhD.
As the company began to establish itself, customers started to want their RGAs to be hooked up to PCs, rather than operating as standalone units. To keep pace with customer wishes, Hiden started to build a new generation of tools, tapping into support from a range of government grants.
The company also started to grow its overseas business, which now accounts for 85 percent of its turnover. Initially it worked with distributors: The first provided access to the US markets, another to France and Germany, and a third provided a presence in South Korea. According to Neale, back in the mid 1980s these countries represented nearly all of the potential market for Hiden’s tools.
As sales ramped, the company required more October 2012
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space to make its products. It doubled its footprint in 1985 by renting the lock-up garage next door, and when this pair of premises became too cramped, it moved to the leafy Gemini Business Park on the northern outskirts of Warrington, a site that it is still on today.
Hiden moved into its first unit in 1987 and stayed until 1996 when bigger premises were essential. “Before we moved, we had a customer in testing a system. He didn’t have room to sit during an acceptance test,” recollects Neale.
The company’s product portfolio continues to expand to this day, driven by requests from customers for new tools. The key to offering such a wide range of equipment is to work with a set of common building blocks. For example, just before the turn of the millennium, Hiden launched a secondary ion mass spectrometer, which is used to determine the atomic constituents of a solid. The key component in this tool is a mass spectrometer, Hiden’s core technology.
In 1996 the company set up Hiden Analytical Inc. to increase the sales of all of its products and provide better support for them. There are now offices in
Monitoring deposition rates in MBE chambers
One of Hiden’s more recent products is an ‘XBS system’. This features a quadrapole mass spectrometer and it is designed for monitoring multiple molecular beam sources simultaneously.
It offer beam acceptance through a 70° cone and can be used for a wide variety of tasks, including: monitoring and controlling MBE
processes; studying molecular beams; analysing multiple beam sources; tracking outgassing and desorption; and uncovering contaminants in the process chamber.
To account for variations in source positions between different chambers, beam acceptance apertures are configured individually for each specific process chamber source position. Protection from the radiant heat sources is realised with a water-cooled, fully shrouded probe.
Hiden moved into is current premises on the Gemini Business Park in 1996
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