Company

EPFL aeral view

Helyssen S.à.r.l has been founded in 2003 by Philippe Guittienne with the goal to commercialize applications licenses on proprietary technologies. Helyssen actual know-how concerns essentially the physics and design of radio frequency helicon plasma sources. Plasma processes play a central role in many industrial applications, especially for semiconductor industries (integrated circuits, solar cells, MEMS, …).

Then, in terms of IP (intellectual property) business, plasma sources are very interesting products as they concern very big markets and various fields of use.

Since the very beginning, Helyssen has entered into collaboration with Christoph Hollenstein of the Plasma Processing group at the Centre de Recherche en Physique des Plasmas (CRPP) of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.

Thanks to this collaboration experimental test benches has been developed on the basis of Helyssen antennas fundamental concepts.

In a long term vision, the aim of Helyssen is to perform by its own means the research and the development on new technologies up to a semi-industrial level, and then to commercialize the corresponding intellectual properties. In a short to medium term vision Helyssen will focus on the valuation of its present IP related to plasma sources. Naturally, very profitable markets for this valuation can be found in the framework of semiconductors industry (e.g. IC manufacturing, solar cells production), but other growing applications such as micromachining, medical sterilization or food packaging are very also promising.

Since July 2009 Helyssen has entered into collaboration with Tetra Pak and the CRPP in the framework of CTI (Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation) programs for the development of plane Helyssen antennas in food packaging applications.