Olympus provides tools for everything in the supply chain

July 16, 2010, Semicon West, San Francisco. You may be most familiar with Olympus cameras, but Olympus is also a world leader in research and clinical microscopes. The company also created the first camera that lets doctors look inside the human body, and continues to introduce life-altering imaging technologies for healthcare professionals.

Olympus combines its expertise in optics and microscopes with specialized platforms, accessories, and software to provide industry and function specific optical instruments. These tools are used in production, R&D , and QA. By marrying various electro-mechanical stages to the optics, and directing the images to a video imager, they support many inspection tasks.

For the semiconductor and nanotechnology areas, they make wafer inspection microscopes, 3d laser measuring microscopes, wafer handlers, software solutions, deep uv imaging, and infrared optics and imaging tools. The types of products they can inspect with these tools include semiconductor wafers, MEMS, hard disk heads, and active and passive displays.

The infrared systems are useful for inspection and failure analysis in silicon, since the wavelengths they use are in the range where silicon is transparent. The uv imaging systems are optimized for central, on-axis viewing with minimal depth of field to enable observation of fine individual surface details.

Historically, they have always made microscopes. For applications such as materials and metallurgy they have polarized light microscopes, metallurgical upright and inverted microscopes, stereomicroscopes, 3d laser measuring microscopes, and automated materials analysis systems. For metrology functions, they make 3d laser measuring microscopes, optical measuring microscopes, and analysis systems