Santa Clara, CA- Timbre Technologies Inc., a TEL company, today announced the release of their next generation Profiler Application Server, PAS-T4, used to process optical measurements.

The PAS provides accurate and precise ODP™ (Optical Digital Profilometry) metrology results for real-time process monitoring and control. A proprietary library search engine is a key component in Timbre's ODP platform, which is widely used in photo, etch, CMP and deposition applications for both stand-alone and integrated metrology systems.

PAS T4, which is optimized for Timbre's ODP 2006 optical metrology platform, includes a robust fault tolerance module that ensures maximum uptime and system reliability. The new platform, in feedback/control mode, dramatically decreases costs through the reduction of re-start times after production-down situations. Additionally, the new system enables customers to protect data with a new automatic data loss prevention system

"With the rapidly growing production use of scatterometry-based optical metrology-ODP, we felt it was very important to provide our customers with the peace-of-mind that comes from being able to rely on superior system robustness and to know that their data would be safe in all situations. Through PAS T4's new high fault tolerance module, we are able to virtually eliminate downtime and provide a mean time to repair of nearly zero," said Sachin Deshpande, PAS product manager at Timbre.

The new T4 system will also provide a significant improvement in computation power, with search speeds up to two times faster than previous PAS generations. The speed enhancements enable timely metrology results to accommodate the trend towards higher sample rates and for complex applications such as BEOL, FinFet and advanced STI structures.

T4 has full backwards compatibility with previous versions of PAS and will support all advanced features, including the popular Focus Exposure Monitor (FEM) option for process window analysis and the Desktop Profile Application Client (PAC) option for remote PAS connection.

Timbre is currently taking orders for the system and first shipments are expected in March 2007. To learn more, please visit us at SPIE this week at Booth # 201.

About Timbre Technologies, Inc.

In production at leading memory and logic device manufacturers around the world, ODP is used in both stand-alone configurations, as well as being integrated into TEL process tools for a wide variety of applications. Timbre's ODP products are the world market share leader for integrated CD metrology. Their ODP platform, introduced in 2002, has nearly 200 systems in use at memory and logic manufacturers worldwide.

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. www.timbrecom.com