FEI INTRODUCES XL810 SEM DEFECT REVIEW AND INSPECTION TOOL AT SEMICON EUROPA
HILLSBORO, Ore., April 15 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ -- FEI Company (Nasdaq: FEIC) announced today the release of its new XL810 scanning electron microscope (SEM) defect review and inspection tool (DRT) at the Semicon Europa trade show in Geneva, Switzerland, opening a new era in the life of this 26-year-old Oregon-based company.
Following beta site work at Micron Technologies and Advanced Micro Devices, FEI reports that it has received orders totaling in excess of $2 million from Siemens for two XL810 units. The tools will be installed in wafer fabs at Siemens' Newcastle, UK, and Dresden, Germany, sites for use in defect review and bit fail map applications.
"Launch of the XL810 opens up a whole new range of markets for our SEM business," said William A. Whitward, FEI's chief executive officer. "It offers particular capabilities for DRAM manufacturers, as well as logic and other memory producers."
Developed at the FEI facility in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, the highly automated XL810 is the first 200mm defect review tool capable of 3-nanometer resolution from 30 kV to below 1kV. It provides both high-resolution imaging and analytical capabilities to support manufacturing yield management for the upcoming generation of 0.18 micron process technologies.
The XL810 is also the first new product to carry the FEI name since FEI recently integrated global operations with Philips Electron Optics (PEO) to create a new company with worldwide sales of around $150 million in the focused ion beam (FIB) workstation and electron microscope markets.
"To achieve the required performance, we had to rethink just about every feature of our previous-generation product," said Jim Jackman, FEI's product manager for wafer-level tools. "Our goal was to create the highest-resolution wafer SEM available for fab and near-fab applications, so we started with an entirely new electron column design."
In addition to breakthrough resolution performance, FEI's new column uses balanced field in-lens detection technology to obtain superior topographic detail and down-hole visibility in the SEM image. This capability is also critical for process optimization applications including high-resolution cross-section analysis. The column also makes available enhanced grain boundary imaging to analyze metallization processes.
"The search is on for a replacement for aluminum and the XL810 is a new tool for evaluating that process," said Jackman.
The new XL810 stage is based on that used in FEI's wafer-level FIB800 focused ion beam workstation and DualBeam 820 FIB/SEM workstation, and is believed by FEI to be the highest-accuracy 200mm tilt stage on the market. Offering navigation accuracy better than 1 micron within a die, the XL810 automatically locates defects while operating at magnifications exceeding 50,000x.
"Our designers succeeded in improving stage performance to handle the harsh fab environment at these new resolution levels without compromising navigational accuracy," added Jackman. "Accuracy is so high you can routinely perform bit fail map navigation in memory cell arrays."
The XL810's bit fail map capability lets an operator use electrical test data to automatically navigate to faulty memory bits on high-density DRAM wafers. Technicians using the XL810 can more quickly locate and identify failure mechanisms at the single-cell level and apply that information to improve process yields.
Dr. Lynwood W. Swanson, FEI's chairman of the board and chief scientist, said the development of the XL810 would not have been possible without the combined expertise of FEI and PEO engineers.
"This next-generation tool is a product of PEO's world leadership in scanning electron microscope technology combined with FEI's long experience in the more specialized semiconductor market," he said.
FEI and PEO had a close collaboration for six years before joining forces in February. They jointly developed hardware and software to enable FEI's use of the Philips XL-series SEM as the platform for its FIB and 'DualBeam' (ion and electron beam) systems. FEI has pioneered field emission based charged particle beam technologies for over 26 years. PEO has an involvement in electron microscopes going back over 60 years.
Founded in 1971, FEI Company is a leading manufacturer of focused ion beam instruments, transmission electron microscopes, scanning electron microscopes and components for submicron-level observation, analysis and manipulation. In 1997, FEI tripled in size when it combined operations with Philips Electron Optics.
Philips Industrial Electronics owns 55% of the new company's common stock. FIB workstations are used primarily in the semiconductor industry for design modification, failure analysis and process analysis.
Major users of transmission electron microscopes and scanning electron microscopes are research institutes, hospitals, universities and industrial customers in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, metals and mining. FEI has approximately 800 employees worldwide, with manufacturing in the US and Europe.
Except for the historical statements contained herein, the matters discussed in this news release, including market, resource allocation and integration expectations, are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.
Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to: difficulties encountered in the integration of the operations of FEI Company and Philips Electron Optics; business conditions and growth in the electronics, life sciences and material sciences industries and the general economy, both domestic and international; lower than expected customer orders; competitive factors, including pricing pressures, technological developments and products offered by competitors; technological difficulties and resource constraints encountered in developing new products; and the timely flow of competitive new products and market acceptance of those products.
SOURCE FEI Co.
CONTACT: William Langley, CFO, of FEI Co., 503-640-7537
(FEIC)