ITHACA, NY – Efforts to push the frontiers of nanoscale chip design received a significant boost today when Xallent, a world leader in nanoscale measuring solutions, today announced pre-orders for their next-generation SAKYIWA system, which features probes 1800X smaller than the current market standard. In addition to smaller probes, the Xallent system speeds up common measurement workflows by 300X, semi-automates repeated measurements, minimizes tedious sample preparation, and provides much higher accuracy measurements of smaller samples. Making consumer electronics smaller, faster, and more powerful depends to a large degree on the ability of the semiconductor industry to create chip designs with smaller design parameters. Currently in volume production is 5 nanometers, but researchers are working on 3 nm, 2 nm, and even 1.4 nm designs, which will be crucial to achieving the promise of technologies such as 6G, autonomous vehicles, and augmented reality wearables. One of the key limitations has been the inability to easily and reliably measure prototypes produced at these small sizes. “Our Xallent system has given our user base several orders-of-magnitude improvement in measurement throughput and drastically decreased their cost of testing,” says Ron Olson, the Director of Operations at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, the first customer for the new technology. “The Xallent system represents a key milestone in semiconductor and thin film materials characterization.” The Xallent system is used for DC, high frequency, CV electrical testing, mechanical and scanning probe testing, imaging, and metrology. Measuring the electrical and mechanical properties of thin film materials, MEMS, photonics, and solid-state devices at the micro and nanoscale can now be done on the same system, faster, with higher resolution, and at a fraction of the cost. The new SAKYIWA system replaces measurement equipment that costs about 5 times as much and takes up 10 times the lab space. “Today’s announcement is the result of years of research and development, and it’s a huge moment for the entire Xallent team,” said Xallent founder and CEO Dr. Kwame Amponsah. Funded in part via grants and partnerships with U.S. Government and New York State agencies including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the U.S. Army, the Xallent technology will help realize the promise of emerging high performance computing technologies. The Xallent system announced today offers a complete solution including probes, probe heads, the wafer prober, and the AI-powered software to run it. For research labs and production facilities that already have substantial hardware investments, Xallent also announced a probe head that works as a drop-in replacement for manipulators on conventional systems and that immediately enables many of the Xallent benefits with essentially no hardware investment. More information about the products and the company can be found at the newly re-designed website www.xallent.com. About XallentXallent LLC designs, develops, manufactures, and markets the world’s most advanced hardware and software tools for micro and nanoscale probing measurements. Xallent’s patented probe cards, probe heads, and wafer probers are used for the most demanding applications in the imaging, electrical, and mechanical testing of semiconductor devices and thin film materials, and enable industry-leading research labs and production facilities to dramatically improve their measurement and analytics capabilities with greater accuracy, speed, and at a lower cost. Xallent was founded by Dr. Kwame Amponsah together with Dr. Amit Lal, and Dr. Ashish Kumar at Cornell University in 2013. The technology was refined and commercialized through grants, partnerships, and contracts with DARPA, NSF, NIST, the U.S. Army, Sandia National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Cornell NanoScale Facility, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and NY State. Xallent is headquartered in Ithaca, New York.
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