Feb 17 2010
Rudolph Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: RTEC), a leading provider of process characterization equipment and software for wafer fabs and advanced packaging facilities, announced today that it has received multiple orders from a long-standing customer valued at $5 million for its S3000A™and MetaPULSE® III thin film metrology systems.
The systems, representing a capacity buy from this Tier One memory manufacturer, are expected to ship to multiple fabs in 1Q and 2Q 2010.
“Memory customers are beginning to increase wafer production capacity as NAND and DRAM business improves. Consequently, we are starting to see the result of our development investments in leading-edge thin-film applications,” stated Mayson Brooks, vice president of sales at Rudolph. “The S3000A systems, featuring our latest laser-based focused beam ellipsometry and MAControl™ (molecular airborne contamination) removal capabilities, meet the customer’s repeatability, stability and tool-to-tool matching requirements for the evolving needs of gate oxide applications. Gate oxide has become thinner with advanced technology nodes, and for the 4X node, our customer concluded that Rudolph’s laser ellipsometry technology offers the preferred solution.”
“The MetaPULSE III, our latest-generation opaque metrology tool designed for high-volume memory processes, will be used for copper metrology applications including Cu seed/barrier, ECD and CMP. Unlike competing techniques such as scatterometry and x-ray, Rudolph’s PULSE™ Technology offers the capability for all of the above copper processes in a single tool. It is able to directly measure thickness and other metrology parameters on product wafers in the active device regions for the most accurate process control, as opposed to indirect measurements on special test structures in the scribe lines,” Brooks concluded.
Source: http://www.rudolphtech.com