NumeriTech Locks Up Reticle Checks

Electronic News, August 13, 2001 by Gale Morrison

Numerical Technologies Inc. (NumeriTech) of San Jose today will disclose how it has locked up the reticle inspection system market-in so far as its Virtual Stepper System software is concerned -- with the signing of a deal with Etec Systems Inc., an Applied Materials Inc. company.

NumeriTech (nasdaq: NMTC) already counts reticle inspection market dominator KLA-Tencor Corp. of San Jose as a Virtual Stepper licensee and OEM as well as Zygo Corp. of Middlefield, Conn., and LaserTec of Yokohama, Japan. With today's Etec agreement, which initially covers the ARIS100i system, NumeriTech has put the reticle inspector market to bed.

"Virtual Stepper, and I'm not trying to be too clever here, has virtually become a standard now," said Atul Sharan, senior vice president of marketing and business development at NumeriTech. "Clearly anybody who's going to be doing reticle inspection for sub-wavelength geometries (below 0.18 micron where the features being etched are smaller than the wavelength of the light etching them), is going to be using Virtual Stepper-Zygo, LaserTec, Applied, then of course KLA. And really, the bulk of the market here is with KLA at something like 85 percent of the market."

Speaking of KLA-Tencor, NumeriTech is licensing from Etec the competition for KLA's reticle inspection equipment, and Numerical just said in July that KLATencor is a preferred provider.

"We are a preferred provider to KLA for sub-wavelength solutions," Sharan said. "The first product to come from that relationship is the reticle inspection system called Pass, which has Virtual Stepper, but there are other things there that we are working on, things not announced yet."

NumeriTech gets a fee from the reticle system suppliers every time they ship a system with Virtual Stepper, Sharan said. Most of the shipments go to the mask makers, such as DuPont Photomasks Inc. of Round Rock, Texas, but some captive mask shops are buying them as well.

Sharan said recent statements from Intel Corp. have shown that a NumeriTech license is worth the money.

"Intel recently confirmed they were using 248-nanometer lithography and PSM (phase-shift masks) for their 0.13-micron process, and they said the yields they were getting are better than they get at 0.18-micron," Sharan said.