Metrosol Teams With Extended Enterprise Partner Owens Design To Speed Product Development, Enhance Performance and Reduce Costs

Austin, TX - 27 February 2008

Metrosol, Inc., a developer, manufacturer and worldwide supplier of short wavelength optical metrology solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Fremont, California-based Owens Design, as part of Metrosol’s Extended Enterprise. The Extended Enterprise is a series of select partnerships with companies with expertise in the engineering, manufacturing and service support of high-volume production equipment for the semiconductor and data storage industry. Owens Design plays a key role in this manufacturing strategy by providing the infrastructure for new product development, targeted software development, platform design and product manufacturing resources, thereby allowing Metrosol’s engineers to focus on their core competency of VUV metrology. Working with Owens Design has enabled Metrosol to reduce product development cycles by as much as 50 percent, while delivering leading-edge Tru-VUV™ technology at the lowest cost of ownership.

In today’s highly competitive and rapidly changing semiconductor market, equipment companies have tight windows in which to deliver the production-worthy technology required to support the latest design cycle.  Failure to meet those market windows results in lost profits and market share. Metrosol leverages its unique Extended Enterprise partnerships to deliver the highest levels of system performance and reliability, fab host compatibility and serviceability. These strategic partnerships also enable Metrosol to assure its customers of short lead times—as little as three months from order to delivery—and maintain those short lead times even in periods of high industry demand.

“We help emerging companies, like Metrosol, which are bringing key new technologies to the market, to compete more effectively against the mature established players,” said Mark Danna, Owens Design’s Sr. Director Business Development. “Where the typical semiconductor company introduces one new platform every few years, we design five to seven new platforms each year. We take that development cycle expertise and work with our partners to develop turnkey, production-worthy, low cost of ownership systems that can be delivered directly to the fab floor.”

Owens Design provides the core expertise in the key areas, such as staging, power management, platform design, software development and electromechanical engineering, needed to bring a fab-ready platform to production. It delivers the manufacturing as well as the design support its partners need to bring their new platforms to market with a minimum of design iterations. Providing a single point of contact for both design and manufacture helps minimize development risks, reduces development costs and accelerates time to market.

“When you are introducing new technology, customers usually have three major concerns: will the technology work as promised; is the platform reliable; and what will it cost,” said Kevin Fahey, Metrosol’s CEO. “Working with Owens Design has allowed our engineers to focus on delivering the technology. We then leveraged Owens’ expertise to help us maximize platform performance, reliability and serviceability, while minimizing production time and cost.” “Many companies have built manufacturing infrastructure and then moved to an outsource model. Metrosol has implemented the efficiency of the outsource model from the beginning.”

Metrosol’s patented Tru-VUV™ reflectrometry represents the leading-edge in the industry’s ultrathin film optical measurement technology, allowing precise collection of reflected light from an enhanced spectral range (800 nm all the way down to 120 nm) on a production-worthy platform. Operating at these shorter VUV wavelengths provides critical data unavailable to the development or fab engineer using other types of reflectometers or ellipsometers. Gauge capable for films below 10 Ǻ, Metrosol’s Tru-VUV© technology can decouple film thickness and composition; is sensitive to N content; as well as other low Z elements; and can measure optical properties at and below 193 nm. The VUV-7000 can provide simultaneous composition and thickness information for the new generation Hafnia based film stacks.

The company delivers its leading-edge VUV measurement technology on a unique modular architecture that provides an unprecedented level of flexibility. Depending on the number of metrology modules deployed on the platform, it can be used as a stand-alone lab metrology tool, be fully integrated into the fab for production use or integrated onto other cluster tools as an in-situ metrology module. Capable of handling up to five metrology modules on a single platform, the system is easily field-upgradeable. In addition, modules can be easily hot-swapped for repair or maintenance, significantly reducing system downtime and reducing platform cost of ownership. Depending on the application or fab requirements, the platform’s flexible, modular architecture can process up to 100 wafers per hour even for advanced applications such as high N, SiON and HfO2, high-k dielectrics.

For more information, please contact:

Press Contact
Christopher Castillo
Castle Communications
Phone: +1.408.244.0657

Sales Contact
Sean Jameson
VP of Sales
Phone: +1.512.833.8750