(Nikon Industrial Metrology: Brighton, MI) -- The Industrial Metrology business unit of Nikon Corp. has released the automatic wafer measurement system NEXIV VMZ-NWL 200 to solve the challenges of wafer metrology in the semiconductor back-end process, where more work is traditionally carried out manually than in front-end process control. The main target market for NEXIV VMZ-NWL 200 is measurement, centered on semiconductor manufacturing processes in the back end.

NEXIV VMZ-NWL 200 alleviates the shortage of skilled technicians for manual measurement. The semiconductor industry has developed along the path of miniaturization, which has increased the skill level required for measurement and reduced the number of available engineers. On the other hand, the semiconductor market continues to expand so the increasing metrology opportunities are being offered to ever fewer people. As a result, manual measurements using conventional optical microscopes have reached their limits.

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