FLandERS, NJ (October 1, 2007)— Rudolph Technologies, Inc.(NASDAQ: RTEC), a leading provider of process characterization solutions for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, today announced it has sold an AXi Automated Macro Defect inspection System to a leading Japanese company in the automotive sector for inspection of automotive devices.
“Our customer was using a micro inspection tool that was due to be replaced, and following an extensive eval
uation, selected the Rudolph AXi Macro Defect Inspection System. The AXi offered the performance they needed—throughput, sensitivity, and ease-of-use–all at a much lower cost-of-ownership than a new micro inspection tool,” said Yasuomi Uchida, chairman and representative director of Rudolph Technologies KK.
“This sale is part of a growing trend in the industry today," said Scott Balak, Rudolph's AXi product manager. "For select applications, fabs have replaced their old, high-cost micro inspection tools with our advanced macro defect inspection systems. With higher throughput and lower cost-of-ownership than micro tools, and better sensitivity than many competitive macro tools, the AXi seems to be hitting the sweet spot for a growing number of applications, particularly in markets like automotive.”
The AXi 935 System offers significantly improved throughput over previous models while maintaining the sensitivity to detect defects down to 0.5 microns. It is particularly useful for outgoing quality assurance (OQA) and CMP applications that require higher resolution than most macro tools can offer. The AXi is a key component of Rudolph’s all-surface inspection technology which, when configured with edge and backside inspection modules, can detect and correlate defects on all surfaces of the wafer. Rudolph's automatic defect classification, defect review, and yield management software helps manu