Collaborative Design/Manufacturing Approach ... - Owens Design

September 23, 2008
Steve Dodson, VP Engineering, Metrosol
Collaborative Design/Manufacturing Approach Critical to
Metrosol VUV Metrology Development
When you are an emerging company, like Metrosol, in a highly competitive market like
the semiconductor capital equipment industry, you need strong competitive advantages
you can leverage. As we grow our business, collaborating on platform design and
manufacturing with Owens Design serves as a force multiplier in a number of crucial
ways that help us optimize the use of our resources, extend the level of our expertise,
provide greater engineering flexibility, help speed time to market and help build customer
confidence in the Metrosol brand.
An emerging company has limited resources, both in terms of personnel and budget.
This can be a real challenge in a cyclical industry like ours. Thanks to our partnership
with Owens Design, if there’s a sudden ramp in demand for our tools, we don’t have to
hire extra staff to meet the demand, only to have to lay them off in a downturn—
something that is particularly bad for morale in a small company. Instead, we can count
on manufacturing and design partner to help us deal with a sudden increase in customer
demand. By the same token, if a customer has a special requirement, we know they
have the expertise needed to meet it.
With over 50 people on their design and manufacturing team, Owens designs and builds
more than five new semiconductor based platforms per year. This overall platform
expertise provides a wide knowledge and engineering resource base for us to draw on. If
Metrosol needs new platform architecture or critical modifications to the current platform,
for example, we wouldn’t be likely to have the overall expertise required on staff. We
can, however, count on Owens Design’s engineers to fill that need. If we want to add to
the basic functionality to our current platform it makes sense, since they designed and
built it, to draw on them when it comes time to upgrade its performance in areas such as
serviceability and manufacturability, throughput, contamination and particle control, and
tool cost reduction. Having a leading design and manufacturing company sign as a
development and manufacturing partner, allows us to focus on and perfect our core
competency in the area of vacuum ultraviolet metrology needed to meet manufacturing
demands at 45 nm and smaller design nodes. This combination of complementary
expertise and resources provides us with the scalable manufacturing capability that
enables us to assure our customers of tool delivery times of approximately three months
regardless of industry demand.
This last capability is critical in building the Metrosol brand. We are an emerging
company, which means to many of our customers that we are a small company with all

the potential drawbacks that can entail. Our collaborative partnership with Owens,
however, has helped to overcome that perception because of the design and
manufacturing capabilities that partnership brings. Beyond that, many of our customers
are familiar with Owens Design. Knowing that they helped design the VUV-7000 platform
helps build confidence in the tool’s quality.
There are considerable barriers to entry for an emerging company in the semiconductor capital
equipment market. In order to succeed, you must be able to quickly develop a technology that
meets some critical industry need better than any other solution available. Then you must be
able to demonstrate that you can deliver that technology on a production-worthy platform at an
acceptable price and in time to meet your customers’ demands. In our case, Metrosol provided
the technology and Owens has been helping us deliver the rest.