TOKYO, JAPAN- Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL; Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; C.E.O., President: Tetsuro Higashi) has begun sales of the P-12XL Enhanced Version wafer prober. This product adds new features to the company's popular P-12XL, a fully automated wafer prober for 300mm wafers. TEL has sold over 200 P-12 XL units since its market release in the first quarter of 2000. The newly developed hardware and related improvements and modifications include a new Sort Loader and Semi Automatic Probe Card Changer (SACC) Cart and an improved Wide Area Probe Polish (WAPP).

Recently, facilities have begun processing both 200mm and 300mm wafers on the same test floor. The wafer cassette options for integrating to semiconductor manufacturing equipment vary. Industry options include the Front Opening Unified Pod (FOUP), 300mm cassette and 200mm cassette specifications. TEL's new Sort Loader is capable of handling these various cassette options, without making physical adjustments to the prober.

Moreover, as semiconductor devices become more complex, the test heads are becoming increasingly larger with each new tester model. The Sort Loader equipped prober has a flat-top design which allows large and regular-sized test heads to be used without having to enlarge the wafer prober or the test cell footprint.

The Semi Automatic Probe Card Changer (SACC) Cart is an option for interchanging probe cards. This new Cart-Based SACC allows for handling larger and heavier Probe Cards. And it reduces CoO by consolidating the number of SACC units across the probe floor.

With recent advances in multiple-die measurement for DRAM and increased I/O devices, the number of pins on, and size of, probe cards has increased. The enhanced Wide Area Probe Polish (WAPP), TEL's solution for on-line cleaning of probe cards, has an increased cleaning area and greater Z force specification than the standard WAPP.

The new product will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2002.