Etec Systems

» see etec.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A chip is printed from a mask, and the mask has to be written first, one pattern at a time, by a machine priced in the millions. Etec Systems built those machines. The business started in Hayward, California in 1970, making scanning electron microscopes, and the electron beam work it grew into ended up inside Perkin-Elmer as the Electron Beam Technology Division.

Etec Systems as a company is younger than that. It was incorporated in 1989 for the sole purpose of buying the division out of Perkin-Elmer, which it did in a leveraged buyout in 1990. Its own prospectus puts the lineage plainly, calling the Perkin-Elmer division the continuation of a business commenced in 1970. In November 1991 it bought ATEQ Corporation, which made laser beam maskmaking systems, and wrote off $10.6 million of in-process technology for the privilege.

What followed was a good decade. Revenue went from $68.7 million in fiscal 1994 to $82.9 million in 1995 to $145.6 million in 1996. The shares started trading on Nasdaq under ETEC on 24 October 1995, and a second offering the following June brought the combined proceeds to about $58.7 million. By the end of July 1996 there were 686 employees, 137 of them in research and engineering, in Hayward and in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The product names only ever appeared on purchase orders. MEBES, for Manufacturing Electron Beam Exposure System, was the electron beam line. CORE and ALTA were the laser beam machines that came with ATEQ. In 1996 the company could say that over 150 MEBES systems had been produced and that at least 115 were still in service, which is a long working life for a machine held to that precision.

~ the case file ~

~ the machine that printed the masks ~

The mask is the stencil. A photomask is a quartz plate carrying the circuit pattern that gets projected onto the wafer, and the pattern on it has to be drawn by something finer than light. An electron beam will do it, slowly and expensively, and a laser will do it faster for less demanding layers. Etec sold both, which is why it held the position it did.

The company's own count in 1996 is the cleanest way to see the scale. It believed that over 250 commercial mask pattern generation systems were installed outside the former Eastern Bloc, and that 167 of them were its own. That is a two thirds share of a global installed base, held by a company most people in computing had never heard of, in a plain industrial building in Hayward.

~ bought at the top ~

Applied Materials signed a merger agreement on 12 January 2000 and completed the acquisition on 29 March, stock for stock, at 1.298 Applied shares for every Etec share, roughly 29 million shares in all, booked as a pooling of interests. The acquisition cost Applied $40 million in pre-tax expenses that fiscal year. It ran Etec as a self-contained business group, and in 2000 there were still 600 people in Hayward.

~ hayward, october 2005 ~

In March 2002 EE Times reported that Applied was reviewing a plan to close the e-beam tool operation. It took three and a half more years. In the middle of October 2005 Applied confirmed it was shutting the subsidiary and leaving the electron beam and laser pattern generation markets entirely, telling Electronic News that the mask market had been a challenging one for a number of years and that the economics of continuing to develop mask pattern generation systems no longer made sense. The installed base would keep getting serviced. Nothing new would be developed. The market Applied walked away from went largely to Micronic Laser Systems of Täby in Sweden.

M. David Levenson, the editor-in-chief of Microlithography World, was asked for comment and finished with "Etec will be missed!", which is not a sentence the trade press often prints about capital equipment. It is also the only obituary this company got. I have never seen one of these machines and neither has almost anyone I know. Every computer I have owned since the 1990s runs on chips that were printed through masks a MEBES or an ALTA wrote.

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