SANTA CLARA, CA-Timbre Technologies, Inc., a TEL company, announces the full product release of their next generation Optical Digital Profilometry (ODPTM) metrology product, ODP TeraGen 1.2. The TeraGen product provides high integrity ODP profiles through customer on-site control and development of run-time results with ODP-NOW and/or with the library generation (LibGen) process. Based on the first generation TeraGen 1.0, shipped to customers in April 2002, TeraGen 1.2 provides many enhancements including improved precision, accuracy, and throughput for the ODP-NOW mode, a streamlined library generation process, and new modeling algorithms required for integrated metrology implementation. TeraGen 1.2 is available in expandable processor configurations and with customized levels of support.

Rigorous and wide beta-site tests have proven that TeraGen 1.2 responds well to customer needs with an easy, flexible, and reliable manner to obtain ODP profiles through either the ODP-NOW or LibGen mode. The dual mode functionality allows customers to fully utilize TeraGen in development cycles and in full production. In research and development environments, customers benefit from improved performance in process window characterizations, process designs, and system qualifications. In production, customers benefit from improved manufacturing robustness with a fast and easy library generation process, and process trouble-shooting capability for fault detection control and failure analysis using ODP-NOW.

Customers are successfully combining the capabilities of ODP-NOW and ODP libraries to cover the large and varying process spaces encountered during development and production implementation. Dr. Nickhil Jakatdar, Senior Technology Director at Timbre, said, "TeraGen delivers a robust data stream, enabling accurate, detailed, and consistent metrology results for both statistical and advanced process control. TeraGen's dual mode ODP functionality provides real-time ODP profiles, model analysis, and ODP library generation over a growing range of applications in a single product, giving customers a flexible, low cost solution for their advanced profile metrology needs."

Additionally, TeraGen 1.2 embodies Timbre's powerful and patent-pending algorithms that shorten total cycle time and meet real world polymer modeling requirements to further enable integrated metrology control for etch applications. Customers have validated the correlation, precision, and flexibility of these advanced features. ODP technology plays a pivotal role for advanced process control on TEL's Coater/Developers (Clean Track) and Etch systems via precise CD and profiles with no metrology overhead or latency.

About Timbre Technologies

Timbre Technologies is the developer of Optical Digital Profilometry (ODP), a metrology breakthrough technology using broadband light to provide non-destructive, high-speed, digital, cross-sectional profiles, including user-selected CDs, profile parameters, and thickness measurements for a wide range of applications. ODP has quickly become the most widely accepted scatterometry approach for advanced process development and control, exceeding the ITRS metrology precision roadmap for many future nodes.

In production at leading memory and logic device manufacturers around the world, ODP is used as a stand-alone solution, and is now also being integrated into TEL process tools for a wide variety of applications.

Timbre Technologies, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL), develops, manufactures, and markets advanced software solutions for the semiconductor and other solid state industries.