WELCOME TO BOIN GMBH

Tomerdingen (Germany) - For immediate release - April 12, 1999

Fremont, CA, April 12, 1999 – Sapphire Software, Inc., the leading software solution provider based in United States, and Boin GmbH, a software company based in Germany have signed the joint marketing agreement. The two companies have also started an alliance to offer a range of software tools for semiconductor manufacturing. These tools will allow semiconductor fabs to increase the resource productivity, yield, and decrease the number of defective wafers.

Under this alliance participating companies will offer a suite of products developed by the member companies. This alliance will focus on jointly advertising the products, display information on each other’s Website, and send a common DEMO CD-ROM and product literature to customers.

The first product suite offered by this alliance is called as “Wafer Studio”. The two applications included in this suite are two Off-line Editing tools from Sapphire Software and Boin GmbH.

Visual Recipe Editor™ (VRE™), a product developed by Sapphire Software allows process engineers and operators in the wafer fab to edit process recipes off-line for ANY process tool. This product runs on Windows95/NT platform. This product offers a wide variety of security features through Recipe Editor Access Manager™ (REAM™). The most promising feature of this product is ‘Parameter level security’ that restricts user from editing unauthorized recipe parameters. The tool comes with built in range, limits checking capability. This product can very easily be integrated into Recipe Management Systems used by Wafer Fabs for recipe storage.

WAFERMAP, developed by Boin GmbH, is an off-line metrology wafer map editing tool. This product is also a Window95/NT based application. This software is typically used in wafer fabs and at equipment suppliers for production and off-line metrology data analysis and visualization. It can import data files from metrology equipment such as thickness gauges, ellipsometers and four point probes used within the semiconductor industry. WAFERMAP can be used to visualize data as 1D, 2D (contour), 3D plots and histograms. It can also be used offline to analyze and print measurement data outside of the clean room. It serves as a tool to standardize the display of wafer data and to allow for an easy comparison between multi-point measurements from different metrology tools.

Contact:

United States of America:

Sapphire Software, Inc., Manish Mehta
E-Mail: manish@sapsoft.com
Web: http://www.sapsoft.com
Tel: +1 (510) 413-4970 ext. 28.

Europe:

Boin GmbH, Dr. Manuela Boin
E-Mail: info@boin-gmbh.com
Web: www.boin-gmbh.com
Tel: +49 (0) 7348-928233