Veeco
Instruments Inc. (Nasdaq: VECO), announced today that Epistar Corporation,
headquartered in Taiwan, has recently qualified Veeco's TurboDisc(R) K465i(TM)
gallium nitride (GaN) Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) System
for high volume light emitting diode (LED) production.
Dr. M.J. Jou, President of Epistar, commented, "Ramping to production
quickly and maintaining high throughput is critical to our success. Veeco enabled
us to qualify the K465i rapidly and it provides the automation required to produce
highly uniform LEDs with minimal downtime. The K465i provides Epistar the ease-of-use
and system availability to meet our growing production requirements."
Bill Miller, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, General Manager of Veeco's MOCVD
Operations commented, "As a result of this successful qualification, we
currently expect to ship a significant number of tools to Epistar this year.
We are excited that we have been chosen to support their volume capacity ramp
in 2010. This is an important milestone for Veeco as we continue to build our
Taiwan installed base."
With superior wavelength uniformity and excellent run-to-run repeatability,
the production-proven K465i extends Veeco's lead in capital efficiency - the
number of good wafers per day for each capital dollar - for high volume LED
manufacturers. The K465i provides ease-of-tuning for fast process optimization
on wafer sizes up to 8 inches and fast tool recovery time after maintenance.