Rudolph Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: RTEC) announced today that a major semiconductor foundry and a top outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facility have placed multi-million dollar orders totaling approximately $17 million for several NSX® Series and Wafer Scanner™ inspection systems. Several systems were shipped in the first quarter and the remaining will ship in the second quarter. The orders represent the increasing value of Rudolph’s flexible hardware and software solutions to meet the demanding wafer-level packaging applications semiconductor manufacturers are facing today.
The foundry customer will use the NSX systems for a rigorous application—high-volume inspection of the die boundary area on identity sensor devices. The OSAT will use the NSX and Wafer Scanner systems for 2D/3D defect and bump inspection and edge die chipping detection in the ramp of new copper (Cu) pillar bumping and wafer-level-chip-scale-packaging (WLCSP) lines for smartphone and automobile applications.
"We are pleased customers recognize our unique value proposition and selected Rudolph in a very competitive macro inspection market,” stated Mike Plisinski, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Rudolph. “By working closely with industry leaders, we will continue to increase our capabilities leveraging all of Rudolph’s core technologies to provide comprehensive and cost-effective solutions to our customers.”
“Our foundry customer found the inspection of die boundaries on identity sensor devices, specifically in the street/kerf region, to be a novel challenge due to the varying test structures in the street. New advanced process materials are susceptible to defects in these areas, which were previously not of concern,” stated Mike Goodrich, vice president and general manager of Rudolph’s Inspection Business Unit. “This particular application involves reconstructed wafers that have unique types of defects that are difficult to distinguish from nuisance defects. Our NSX system offers advanced detection algorithms that were able to control this new region of yield concern at the high throughput levels required by the customer.”
Goodrich added, “Our OSAT customer was looking to ramp their Cu pillar bump line fast and has come to rely on Rudolph for fully-automated inspection to reduce operation costs, enhance bumping and sawing quality and improve yield. At the customer’s request, we will also initiate an evaluation of our automatic defect and classification (ADC) software to further demonstrate process control yield improvement.”
The NSX family is the market leader for automated macro defect inspection for advanced packaging. The NSX system’s unique image processing technique was critical for the challenging kerf inspection application, where a traditional die-to-die comparison would not suffice. The Wafer Scanner Series provides three-dimensional (3D) inspection and bump height metrology required throughout post-fab processes for both standard and flip chip wafers.
