According to recent LinkedIn posts and a press release, polymer manufacturing leader Zeon Specialty Materials Inc. (subsidiary of Zeon Corporation, Japan) recently acquired Edge Precision Manufacturing, a microfabrication manufacturing house based in the Boston, MA area. In the world of microfluidics, Zeon is a well known manufacturer of its cyclic olefin copolymers (COPs) Zeonor® and Zeonex®, widely used in the injection moulding of microfluidic products.
The manufacture of plastic microfluidic devices is most often performed with injection moulding, given its economic edge at high volumes, and less often with hot embossing, given its slower throughput, however hot embossing has the edge for devices with more demanding fine features and fidelity requirements. Edge Precision Manufacturing, formerly Edge Embossing, is able to combine the best of both worlds with a high volume, high precision hybrid approach, where hot embossing is used for the most demanding areas of a component, and injection moulding for the more routine feature sizes.
Zeon’s acquisition of Edge Precision Manufacturing is the latest in a series of microfluidics and MEMS fab house acquisitions that has seen Invenios acquired by Corning and thinXXS acquired by IDEX in 2017, miniFAB acquired by Schott and Micralyne acquired by Teledyne in 2019, and most recently microLIQUID acquired by TE Connectivity in 2021.