AQUEST SYSTEMS OPEN NO-WAIT-AMHSSM

chip123

Development Facility for Next-generation IC Fab Automation Capability

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and TAICHUNG, Taiwan, March 3, 2008—Aquest Systems, which is developing next-generation Automated Material Handling Systems (AMHS) for the global semiconductor industry, today announced the development of a multimillion-dollar No-Wait-AMHSSM (NWA) facility in Taichung, Taiwan. Located in close proximity to major IC manufacturers, the new facility, named NWA, will demonstrate the benefits of Aquest’s FabEX™-based AMHS for high-volume 300-mm IC fabrication. The NWA will be another critical step of implementing Aquest’s No-Wait-ManufacturingSM vision—a vision for a family of products and services that provide IC manufacturers with a solution to significantly reduce or eliminate the unnecessary waits or delays that affect manufacturing productivity in an IC fab.

Expected to come on-line later this year, the new NWA will be in a dedicated 20,000 square-foot facility in Taichung, and will offer the full breadth of Aquest’s FabEX™ hardware and software automation solutions, which will be installed to accurately simulate a 300-mm IC fab in production. Specifically, the NWA will simulate interactions with more than 48 different types of processing and inspection/metrology systems. This will involve 100 loadports as well as interfaces to stockers and fab-wide material control software. Over 300 meters of Aquest’s FabEX Transporter and more than 18 FabEX Loaders will be installed in the NWA. A representative process flow will be utilized to quantify the expected impact of NWA on significantly reducing fab cycle time. Overall, the NWA solution is expected to improve the productivity of IC manufacturers with faster swap times, better response to burst capacity needs and a higher movement capacity per bay that exceeds 1,000 moves per hour—all with significantly shorter delivery times compared to conventional systems.

6 d6 V. V! P9 {. v* Z7 `The NWA facility will develop, test and optimize NWA sub-systems and products in partnership with Tera Autotech Corporation and a major Japanese automation company. Tera Autotech is a Taiwan-based company that focuses on the engineering, manufacture and distribution of automation equipment and micro drills for various industries. The resulting Aquest products will be fabricated via manufacturing partners in Taiwan and Japan.
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* ~2 Q2 f' J' _2 dAccording to Aquest, in order to protect the unique aspects of the FabEX-based AMHS sub-systems and the NWA architecture, multiple international patents have been filed.