Accent's Caliper with Linux Eliminates 'Blue Screen of Death' Issues

Accent Optical Technologies (www.accentopto.com), a leading supplier of lattice engineering and photolithography process control tools, today gave an example of why mission critical systems need truly reliable operating systems like Linux.

Contrasting recent "blue screen" embarrassments for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Accent pointed to its experience of the high reliability and network security of the Linux operating system, used on its Caliper series overlay metrology tools.

"We've been seeing consistent tool availability numbers of nearly 100% in our install base since we deployed Linux on the Caliper. This is 3-5% higher than typical Windows(TM)-based systems," said Hugh Fink, Product Manager for Overlay Systems at Accent. "And we find that customers rank this highly in their selection criteria for new tools."

"It's more than crash resistance though," says Fink. "We know of several cases where our customer's entire fabs, in North America and Asia, were shut down by virus infection over the last few months. Accent's Caliper tools, running Linux, remained unaffected throughout."

Manufacturing facilities certainly understand the security risks and take extensive measures to "lock down" fab networks. Ironically, putting those facilities behind a firewall makes maintaining up-to-date virus protection a challenge. Meanwhile, it only it takes one infected laptop to be connected to a vulnerable tool to result in catastrophic infection and rapid breakdown of the entire network. With virus removal often running to hours per system, the cost of the original infection can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars. "The key is to build the fab around fundamentally virus resistant tools," says Fink. "We think that Linux provides a platform from which we can provide the robustness that's needed."

Linux is acknowledged by security experts to be fundamentally more resistant than Windows operating systems to viruses. In the complex computing environment of the modern semiconductor fab, the advantages of Linux are increasingly apparent.

Contacts

Accent Optical Technologies
Elizabeth Justema, 541-322-2506
ejustema@accentopto.com

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