Asyst Technologies, inc., the leader in Agile Automation™, today announced that its Spartan Integrated Sorter has been selected by a major IC manufacturer for installation in four different fabs, fully displacing a competitor’s previously installed equipment.  The company expects to book orders and recognize the related revenue, estimated at approximately $15 million, over a 12-18 month customer implementation period.

Asyst continues to gain share in the sorter market..  According to industry research firm Gartner Dataquest, in calendar year 2007 Asyst expanded its market share in the wafer management segment of the worldwide semiconductor equipment market by 11%, to a leading 42% share overall.  This helped to drive a 32% year-over-year increase in Asyst’s sales in the segment for calendar 2007, a difficult year for other semiconductor equipment.

The Spartan Sorter is a unified wafer management solution embodying the minimum scale and complexity necessary to sort wafers as cleanly and quickly as possible.  It provides leading 300mm performance with the lowest demonstrated particle performance for better than Class 1 cleanliness, high reliability for fast start-up times and unique, integrated NexEDA™ software for easy fab integration. It also offers “fast swap” wafer exchanges, or movement of two wafers simultaneously, to achieve high throughput while mitigating the risk of wafer damage.

“Based on recent independent market share figures and increasing customer acceptance, we believe the Spartan Sorter is the best-of-breed sorter solution in the marketplace and the clear market leader,” said Paula LuPriore, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Automation Solutions, for Asyst. “We believe these influential recent wins for Spartan will fuel further market share gains in the wafer management segment.. The Spartan is an important tool for Asyst, representing our ability to create an entirely new solution to address the needs of today’s manufacturing environments, and to integrate seamlessly into a comprehensive fab automation strategy and toolset.”