 Williams Advanced Materials
Williams has a long and vast history dating back to the Klondike gold mining days. The company was formed in 1907. Through the years Williams has made many significant contributions to the metals industry. In the 1920's Reginald V. Williams developed the first commercial application of induction melting for dental alloys. It was not until the 1970's that this process of melting metal became widespread, and was acknowledged as the premier process for producing consistent high quality homogenous alloys.
During the 1960's through the mid 1980's, Williams set the standards for the dental industry and became a leading supplier of precious metal and high purity metals to the growing micro electronic industry.
In 1986 Brush Engineered Materials (BEM) acquired the Williams Gold Company.
Brush immediately split the company into two divisions, Dental and Industrial. The Dental group was sold to Ivoclar Vivadent and today Williams Advanced Materials (WAM) continues to supply dental alloys to Ivoclar Vivadent. With new leadership, a strong vision and the financial backing of BEM, WAM began to grow and flourish.
The 1990's became the decade of redefining Williams!
WAM quickly became known as a "niche market supplier". By utilizing its material processing and product development knowledge, Williams has easily taken the role of "leading material supplier" in many markets, including Data Storage, Hybrid micro electronics, Semiconductor packaging and the Photonics and Wireless industries.
Throughout out the 1990's, WAM grew globally by establishing a manufacturing and sales facility in Singapore to support Asia, and a sales office in the United Kingdom to service the European marketplace. With these two strategic moves, WAM quickly gained global market share and spread its industry leading customer service standards worldwide.
This decade marks the beginning of a period of acquisitions that is still in progress today. The most notable acquisitions were of Pure Tech Inc. and the purchase of certain assets of the Semi Alloys Company. The 1998 purchase of Pure Tech Inc. completed WAM's Thin Film product offering by adding high purity non precious metals, cermets and ceramic materials, along with additional material processes including powder. The Semi Alloys Technology purchase included the registered trademark name Combo-Lids®. Williams had been a longtime supplier of the same product under the brandname of FLA'S (Frame Lid Assemblies). With this acquisition WAM became the largest manufacturer of Combo-Lids® worldwide. This also brought instant recognition to WAM's complete micro electronic packaging product line worldwide.
The year 1998 marked the expansion of manufacturing in Western New York with the opening of our Wheatfield production facility, which is designed to produce high temperature braze materials and to meet the ever increasing demand for thin film sputtering targets. Throughout the mid to late 1990's WAM continually expanded its in-house refining capability and service offering to customers. With the new millennium approaching, WAM continued to develop new and innovative hermetic lids for its Micro electronic packaging product line and numerous new material processes and product enhancements to increase yields, material performance, and target utilization for its thin film materials.
With the start of the new millennium, WAM expanded with sales and manufacturing locations in Korea and Taiwan and sputtering target bonding facilities in California and Ireland. In 2003 WAM introduced another hermetic lid, the Visi-Lid™ for the newest generation of Opto electronics packages. In the spring of 2005 WAM purchased OMC Scientific to help augment its shield kit cleaning and refining services, increase its presence in the European marketplace, and enhance our value added services globally.
The Williams management team's vision is to proactively exploit our manufacturing and innovation strategies to provide the highest value to our customers around the globe. Williams Advanced Materials' goals are to lead the way in niche markets while focusing on emerging new technologies.
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