KLA Tencor - History

History

KLA-Tencor was formed in April 1997 through the merger of KLA Instruments (KLA) and Tencor Instruments (Tencor), two long-time leaders in the semiconductor equipment industry. Prior to the merger, both businesses served a segment of the inspection and metrology area; with KLA focused on defect inspection and Tencor placing its emphasis on metrology. Merging in a one-to-one stock swap valued at $1.3 billion, KLA-Tencor became the most important process control player in the industry, bringing to market a complete line of yield management products and services from a single company.

KLA was named after its founders, Ken Levy and Bob Anderson. The word “Tencor” came about because the founder of Tencor, Karel Urbanek, wanted a two syllable name that would be easy to remember.

KLA Instruments was first established in 1975, with its first product emerging on the market in 1978—an automated inspection system that reduced photomask inspection time from eight hours to 15 minutes. Shortly thereafter, KLA Instruments went public and expanded its inspection product portfolio to include patterned wafer inspection systems. Two years later, KLA further broadened its offerings into the wafer metrology business through optical overlay and line-width measurement systems. During the subsequent few years, the company expanded its product base through the development of software tools to help integrate inspection and measurement data for analysis—ultimately forming the industry’s first yield management group to provide customers with expertise in yield enhancement through engineering consulting services.

1977, Tencor Instruments established its name, and first introduced its product—the Alpha-Step stylus surface profiler—just seven months later. This tool provided significant improvement in step-height measurement, a critical parameter in measuring film layer thickness. In 1984, Tencor Instruments launched its first Surfscan product—a particle and contamination defect system based on laser scanning technology, which soon became the production standard. By the late 1990s, Tencor had broadened its product offerings to also include defect review and data analysis tools. Following an initial public offering in 1993, Tencor then acquired Prometrix, a leading supplier of thin-film measurement tools, and further expanded its product offering. At the time of its merger with KLA, Tencor had revenues of approximately $403 million and 1,400 employees around the world.

Since the merger in 1997, KLA-Tencor has acquired the following companies: 1998 • Amray Inc. • Nanopro GmbH • The Quantox product line from Keithley Instruments, Inc • VARS • The Ultrapointe subsidiary of Uniphase Corporation 1999 • ACME Systems Inc. 2000 • Fab Solutions, from ObjectSpace Inc. • FINLE Technologies, Inc. 2001 • Phase Metrics 2004 • Candela Instruments • Wafer Inspection Systems business of Inspex, Inc. 2006 • ADE Corporation 2007 • OnWafer Technologies • SensArray Corporation • Therma-Wave Corporation 2008 • ICOS Vision Systems Corporation NV • Microelectronic Inspection Equipment (MIE) business unit of Vistec Semiconductor Systems 2010 • Ambios Technology

KLA-Tencor continues to exploit the semiconductor equipment industry and also a number of other industries, including the light emitting diode (LED), data storage, as well as general materials research.