Nikon and KLA-Tencor Announce New Overlay Solution and the Sales of Total Overlay Accuracy Improvement System Scanner Match Maker

Nikon Corporation (Michio Kariya, President) and KLA-Tencor, the world leader in semiconductor wafer inspection/metrology tools (President & COO John Kispert : NasdaqGS : KLAC) today announced that they will launch Scanner Match Maker (SMM), a system for improving overlay accuracy, in the First Quarter of 2008. The SMM system successfully demonstrated over 30% improvement in overlay accuracy in a jointly conducted baseline assessment. The system is currently being evaluated and validated at a major chip maker on real processes.

Sales Summary

Development Background

As design rules shrink to 45 nm and beyond, tens of layers of circuit patterns need to be exposed with a single nanometer level accuracy, which, in turn, makes it critical to improve overlay accuracy. The 2005 ITRS required tighter lithography overlay budgets. To respond to this, Nikon and KLA-Tencor have studied a system that utilizes each other's strength and know-how in view of actual customer production sites. The SMM System is an integration of a scheme for integrating and managing wafer layer data from a lithocluster including lithography tools other than NSR and a technology for improving accuracy based on Nikon's proprietary overlay correction technology.
The system will enable flexible and efficient utilization of NSR at customer production sites and will become a solution for chip defect rate improvement, cost reduction and accelerated ramp-up time for new process technology in the future.

Main Characteristics

1. Automated management of vast amount of tool data required for overlay
2. Automation of complex overlay accuracy improvement previously done manually
3. Quick and efficient automated overlay accuracy improvement among lithography tools, including tools other than NSR
4. System introduction using only software and management server made possible by simple configuration.

System Configuration

Careful consideration was given to enhancing features of the systems already available from Nikon and KLA-Tencor in introducing SMM. Overlay logic and overlay database/automatic correction software were jointly developed and offered with a connectivity license for easy introduction of the system into existing production lines to enhance Nikon's LEES Server, a self diagnostics information management system, and KLA-Tencor's K-T Analyzer (KTA), an information integration management server integrated with K-T's Archer overlay metrology platform.

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, California, the Company has sales and service offices around the world. An S&P 500 company, KLA-Tencor is traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol KLAC. Additional information about the Company is available at http://www.kla-tencor.com.

• http://www.kla-tencor.com