Front-End Atmospheric Wafer Automation Products Receive Higher Market Attraction

Crossing Automation, Inc., today announced strong growth in orders for its range of front-end atmospheric wafer automation products, spurred mainly by multiple new design wins for its Spartan, Falcon and IsoPort technologies as well as strong repeat business for Spartan, Falcon, IsoPort, 200 mm products and RFID systems.

Crossing added the front-end atmospheric component to its business through the acquisition of Asyst Technologies' atmospheric assets in September, 2009.

"We have had a phenomenal business reaction since the Asyst acquisition and are extremely appreciative of the confidence our customers have shown in Crossing," stated Robert MacKnight, president and CEO, Crossing Automation. "It is a testament to both the quality of the products and our new approach to the OEM and IDM community, an approach that has been welcomed to the extent of putting the company a year-ahead of schedule in terms of revenue and realized earnings."

Crossing's approach is directly focused on providing subsystem modules for substrate automation through direct collaboration with OEMs to enable faster time-to-market, lower development costs, greater configurability and lower inventory costs. Prior to the acquisition, Crossing had already developed a set of vacuum-compatible modules and a system controller design for wafer-level automation based on these principles.

"Backed by strong financials, we are now able to focus on bringing our unique modular approach to market to provide customers with more configuration choices at a highly competitive price point while driving cycle time down significantly to maximize flexibility for our customers," added MacKnight. "ExpressConnect re-wrote the rules by simplifying the development process with our building block approach. We are applying the same rules to the atmospheric business to offer a flexible and customizable approach that will help drive performance throughout the automation market."

The current roadmap calls for integrating the two product sets into the same modular delivery approach in order to offer a complete end-to-end automation solution to the OEM community, positioning Crossing as one of the industry's leading suppliers of wafer-level automation. This will deliver the greatest possible manufacturing flexibility to Crossing's OEMs at the lowest possible cost. As the next step, Crossing will engage directly with its customers to validate its product roadmaps to ensure that Crossing's product development timelines are aligned with its customers' requirements.

From the customer's perspective, Crossing's ability to provide an almost infinite number of configurations from a small set of modular products that includes both atmospheric and vacuum building blocks, as well as fully integrated systems, means they are able to simplify forecasting their internal requirements. Crossing's common, configurable modules can reduce inventory, lower overhead and contribute to a dramatic reduction in cycle time. Complementing this product offering is a globally established, 24/7 local language customer support capability.

Crossing Automation Vacuum-Wafer Level Automation

Crossing Automation's vacuum ExpressConnect modular building block family of automation components for vacuum wafer handling systems delivers integrated vacuum wafer handling sub-systems with small footprints, low costs and high productivity for semiconductor manufacturing. ExpressConnect is a suite of five building blocks that are combined to generate unlimited configurations for wafer automation. These sub-system configurations quickly and easily assemble into process driven solutions. ExpressConnect's system architecture uses highly reliable linear transfer devices and simplified control algorithms to improve efficiencies and control reliability.

Crossing Automation Atmospheric Wafer-Level Automation

Crossing offers a broad range of leading-edge, cost-effective 300 mm, 200 mm, and 150 mm atmospheric wafer handling technologies to both OEMs and semiconductor manufacturers including isolation, robotics, and tracking. Crossing's product solutions include: market-leading robotic wafer sorters, fully integrated equipment front end modules (EFEMs), front-end tool interface products and auto-ID capabilities for material tracking and management.

Source: http://www.crossinginc.com/