Nanometrics Incorporated
(Nasdaq: NANO), a leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of high-performance
process control metrology systems used primarily in the manufacturing of semiconductors,
advanced wafer-scale packaging, solar photovoltaics and high-brightness LEDs,
today announced multiple system orders for its Caliper Mosaic overlay metrology
systems and its complete NanoCD suite including Atlas OCD systems, NanoDiffract(tm)
software, and NanoGen(tm) cluster computing solutions. The Caliper Mosaic system
purchase orders were incremental to orders previously announced on August 3,
2009. This single customer booking in the current quarter represents more business
than Nanometrics' worldwide product and upgrade revenues recorded in the second
quarter of this year.
The Caliper Mosaic and Atlas OCD systems are expected to be installed and qualified
in the third and fourth quarter of this year at multiple fab sites of a leading
memory customer, supporting lithography cell control and optical critical dimension
(OCD) metrology. In addition, this customer is upgrading its substantial installed
base of Nanometrics metrology systems with the industry-leading NanoDiffract
OCD software to further leverage the advanced process control capabilities of
Nanometrics' solutions. The NanoDiffract software upgrades and NanoGen
are expected to be deployed and qualified in the third quarter of this year
and will support additional OCD monitoring across multiple factories including
critical process control applications for advanced Flash memory and DRAM.
"Nanometrics is pleased to announce the increased acceptance of our technology
by a key customer for their most advanced high-volume DRAM and Flash production
sites," commented Michael Fischer, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at
Nanometrics. "Our customer is expanding their use of the Caliper Mosaic
for critical lithography cell control due to the superior performance and low
cost of ownership of the systems. We have also been working jointly with our
customers to develop and implement advanced key process control capabilities
with our NanoCD suite. We have pushed the performance of our OCD solutions into
process control regimes not attainable by CD-SEM or other methods. The result
is adoption of our OCD technology in advanced nodes, as well as proliferation
across last-generation production lines, where tracking of key process control
parameters can prevent costly yield excursions. This deployment is expected
to result in higher baseline yields, faster return on investment and lower manufacturing
costs for our customer."
Nanometrics' NanoCD suite of technologies, which includes the Atlas OCD
system, NanoGen scalable cluster computing and NanoDiffract software, has become
an industry-leading solution for advanced in-device metrology and process control
on complex structures. Nanometrics' Atlas OCD systems enable complex structure
and process control non-destructively and can be deployed at all key process
steps in line for film thickness, profile and critical dimension control.
The Caliper Mosaic is the latest generation of Nanometrics' overlay metrology
system for lithography process control. In addition to customer target designs,
the Caliper Mosaic can support Blossom technology enabling simultaneous multi-layer
measurements that are especially beneficial in double patterning processes,
offering superior precision for advanced lithography process control of critical
layers and substantially reducing total target real-estate requirements.