TOKYO -- Japanese firms producing semiconductor-manufacturing equipment are boosting output of machines capable of making advanced chips in response to recent growing demand, a newspaper said Friday.
Japanese camera maker Nikon will release in October new technology that can draw circuit patterns as narrow as 80 nanometers, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.
Nikon, whose major profit-earner lies in semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, aims to sell 15 units of the new stepper this fiscal year to March 2004, the business daily said.
The manufacturer aims for overall stepper sales of 235 units in this fiscal year, up 22 percent, it said.
Tokyo Electron has introduced a system to trim a production period from four months to two months for its new thermal processors for circuits with 100-nanometer design rules, the business daily said.
With the system, the top ranked chip-making equipment manufacturer aims to raise sales of such products by 67 percent to 100 units in this fiscal year to March 2004, it said.
Advantest plans to enter the market for testers for analog chips mounted in cars later this year, aiming for annual sales of five billion yen (42 million dollars) for the fiscal year to March 2004, it said.
Advantest, affiliated with Japanese computer maker Fujitsu, is one of the biggest measuring instruments makers.
Japan's sales of chip-making equipment, which topped one trillion yen three years ago, more than halved for the previous fiscal year to March 2003 due to a slump in information technology production.
But chip-making equipment sales are expected to increase 18.6 percent for the current fiscal year in Japan thanks to a recovery in earnings at high-tech companies
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