Sensitivity and Ease of Use Enhancements Enable Rapid and Cost-Effective Inspection of DRAM, SRAM, Flash, and Logic Devices at High Defect Capture Rates

SEMICON TAIWAN, Taipei, Taiwan, Sept. 11, 2006--KLA-Tencor (NASDAQ: KLAC) today unveiled the Puma 91xx darkfield patterned wafer inspection system--the latest member of its widely adopted Puma product family. Designed to capture the broadest range of critical defect types at the lowest cost of ownership (CoO), the Puma 91xx Series provides nearly double the throughput of the previous-generation Puma 9000 Series at equivalent or better sensitivity--making it the performance leader for darkfield inspection for the 65-nm and 45-nm nodes. Multiple Puma 91xx Series systems have already shipped to leading logic, DRAM and Flash fabs worldwide, where they are used for advanced tool and line monitoring applications in production. KLA-Tencor's current installed base of  Puma 9000 systems can be field upgraded to 91xx Series performance levels.

"Defect capture, sampling frequency, and cost per inspection are very important considerations for optimizing ourinspection strategy," stated Masanori Numano, manager of the Material and Process Engineering Group at Toshiba Oita. "As we transitioned to 65 nm, we needed an inspection platform that could meet production throughput requirements without compromising sensitivity. The Puma 91xx has demonstrated this capability in our 300-mm production line."

At sub-65-nm design rules, the competitive environment, shorter product lifecycles, and the escalating costs ofadvanced process nodes drive the need for cost-effective manufacturing. These economic pressures increase thefocus on cycle time reduction, CoO, and capital management. As a result, IC manufacturers need to extract the most value from their equipment without sacrificing the performance required to maximize and protect their yield. To meet this need, inspection tools must be capable of providing both cost- and performance-optimized defect monitoring on the broadest range of process layers. The Puma 91xx Series leads in defect-type capture as well as production throughput, and its flexible architecture can be configured to meet a wide range of applications and price points for memory and logic devices.

The Performance Leader for All Device Types

The Puma 91xx Series provides significant improvements in speed, sensitivity and ease of use. Enhanced data processing nearly doubles inspection throughput compared to the Puma 9000 Series at equivalent sensitivity. Additional pixel combinations provide the widest range of production-mode throughputs available, to enable more sampling, higher sensitivity or lower CoO. Like its predecessor, the Puma 91xx Series incorporates KLA-Tencor's proprietary Streak™ multi-pixel sensor and line scanning technologies to achieve high-resolution darkfield imaging inspection without the speed and sensitivity limitations of darkfield systems based on acousto-optic device (AOD) and photo multiplier tube (PMT) technology.

Enabling Faster Integration into Production

Tool recipe setup has been significantly simplified with KLA-Tencor's new Fast Adaptive Single Threshold (FAST) algorithm, which reduces the number of parameters needed to create and tune tool recipes by nearly 80 percent over the previous algorithm. KLA-Tencor's inline Defect Organizer™ (iDO™) binning solution provides more accurate defect classification for faster root-cause identification. Commonality with KLA-Tencor's 23xx/28xx brightfield inspectors and the eS3x e-beam inspectors enables recipe sharing between platforms for optimizing inspector capacity and speeding inspection tool integration into production.

"With the introduction of the Puma 9000 last year, we experienced rapid adoption primarily because of the tool's ability to simultaneously address our customers' technological and economic pressures," stated Paul Marella, vice president and general manager of KLA-Tencor's Wafer Inspection Division. "We are pleased that the nextgeneration Puma 91xx Series offers our customers an even faster, easier-to-use system that can uniquely address a broad range of inspection applications for 65-nm and 45-nm memory and logic devices."

About KLA-Tencor: KLA-Tencor is the world leader in yield management and process control solutions for semiconductor manufacturing and related industries. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., the company has sales and service offices around the world. An S&P 500 company, KLA-Tencor is traded on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol KLAC.

Streak, inline Defect Organizer and iDO are trademarks of KLA-Tencor.
 

Contact:
Meggan Powers
Director Corporate Communications