May 10 2010
Nova Measuring Instruments Ltd. (NASDAQ: NVMI) provider of leading edge stand-alone metrology and the market leader of integrated metrology solutions to the semiconductor process control market, today announced the availability of productivity enhancement packages.
The packages elevate the metrology performance and increase the sampling rate of wafers being processed to enable tighter process control. Customers also enjoy the benefit of improved cost of ownership, by extending tool lifetime to advanced technology nodes, increasing throughput and reducing consumables costs.
The basic productivity package provides the following benefits:
- Up to 40% reduction in cycle time, enabling 100% sampling to increase
process CPk
- Up to 30% improvement in precision and long term stability
- 3-times longer lamp lifetime, reducing tool maintenance costs
The second package is the Optical CD productivity package, which expands the measurement capabilities of a thin film integrated metrology tool to Optical CD applications, addressing the increase in application complexity and pattern densities experienced by customers as they migrate existing capacity to next generation technology nodes.
"The introduction of productivity enhancement packages is evidence of our commitment to protect our customers' investment in Nova's metrology," said Ziv Barzilay, Director of Global Services at Nova. "As semiconductor manufacturers ramp up following the downturn, they deploy existing equipment to its maximal capacity. By expanding the performance envelope of integrated metrology, our customers achieve higher utilization and better yield at advanced technology nodes. We already shipped productivity packages to leading memory manufacturers in two continents and the interest we see is high. Going forward we will continue to develop more enhancements for our installed base which will be announced as they become available later this year."
Source: http://www.nova.co.il/