Santa Clara, California, July 2001 -- Advantest Corporation is one of the world's leading automatic test equipment (ATE) suppliers to the semiconductor industry and is the leader in offering a full range of innovative IC test products and solutions, from handlers to testers to custom handler-tester interfaces.

Advantest was founded in Japan in 1954 as a leading producer of electronic and optoelectronic instruments and systems. Since then, semiconductor ATE equipment has become the dominant portion of Advantest's worldwide business. Expanding its semiconductor ATE business, Advantest established its North American subsidiary, Advantest America, in 1982, and established its European operation in 1983. The company also has subsidiaries throughout Asia, and has more than 4,300 employees worldwide.

Market and Technology Leader
Advantest's semiconductor test products encompass SoC, memory, mixed-signal, RF and E-beam test markets. According to Prime Research's 2000 market analysis, Advantest is a leader in the worldwide semiconductor test system market, with 23 percent of ATE sales, up more than 3 percentage points over the previous year. Advantest is also the dominant ATE supplier in the memory segment, with 63 percent of the worldwide market. In recent years, the company has focused on the SoC market, and last year had 9 percent of the SoC/mixed-signal market. Advantest also has 18 percent of the VLSI/LSI test market.

The worldwide ATE market is expected to expand, with much of the growth projected to come from the logic and memory segments. ATE market growth tracks semiconductor market growth, as demand continues to escalate for "smart" consumer, business, telecommunications, and medical products, and computers.

In addition to the company's prominent position in testers, Advantest is the world leader in device handlers, both gravity-fed and robotic pick and place, with 39 percent of the worldwide pick and place handler market, according to VLSI Research. Advantest leadership derives from the largest number of installed systems, as well as its vertically-integrated capacity to design and manufacture handlers, virtually guaranteeing maximum precision and reliability. Advantest is also the major supplier of robotic handlers, the projected high growth segment for handlers.

Research and development is conducted in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Advantest America's R&D Center, based in Santa Clara, develops future generations of systems incorporating state-of-the-art methodologies and solutions for microprocessor design and test.

The center encompasses research, conceptual and architectural design, and hardware and software prototyping, and works closely with Advantest's Research and Development Centers in Gunma and Ootone, Japan. Advantest has recently expanded the Gunma facility and has announced plans to add a third R&D center in Japan, which will focus on SoC system development.

In addition, in 1999 The Advantest Test Engineering Corporation (ATEC) was established in Santa Clara to provide test technology services specifically for each customer. ATEC also develops innovative products for the ATE market.

Customer Leadership and Consistent Ranking In Top Ten
Advantest operates in 11 countries around the world. The company has more than 13,000 ATE test systems installed globally, many of them in world-class computer and semiconductor companies, such as AMD, Celestica, Compaq, Fairchild, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LSI, Agere, Micron, Motorola, NEC, Philips Semiconductor, Samsung, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, TSMC, UMC and White Oak.

For thirteen consecutive years, Advantest has been ranked among VLSI Research's Top Ten Best semiconductor equipment companies and was rated number one overall in 1990. The ranking is based on customer satisfaction with ATE companies' technical leadership, product performance, process and software support, and service.

Company's Testers, Handlers Set the Pace For the Industry
Among Advantest's most recent product announcements are systems that lead the industry in speed, uncompromised functionality, and accuracy and reliability:

• The T6500 Logic Test System Family, the industry's only scalable SOC test solution.
• The T6600 Logic Test System Family, including the T6683, the industry's most versatile and advanced test solution for SoC and MPU devices, and the T6673, a low-cost, high-volume production partner to the T6683, which tests up to 500 MHz and offers a full complement of mixed-signal and analog instruments.
• The M6541A Dynamic Test Handler, designed for the next generation SoC devices and capable of simultaneously testing up to four SoCs with throughput of 600 devices an hour.

Customized Test Engineering Solutions and Interface Designs
As part of its strategy to offer the industry total solutions and in a clear demonstration of industry leadership, Advantest was the first ATE company to establish a Custom Design Engineering Group offering "one stop" high performance electromechanical ATE design services.

The group creates customized interface solutions for handler-to-tester electrical interfaces; handler-to-tester mechanical docking mechanisms; prober-to-tester electrical and mechanical interfaces; and custom performance boards, DUT boards for manual testing and sockets, contactors, and contacts.

These capabilities, along with Advantest's full line of testers and handlers, makes Advantest the industry's more comprehensive provider of single-vendor solutions.

SoC Test Solutions Include Industry Partnerships
As it makes inroads into the logic market and to meet its logic customers' needs for total hardware and software solutions, Advantest has developed a software architecture that includes its newest software product, Viewpoint, a comprehensive software framework that gives software and test engineers multiple views of development and analysis functions.

Perhaps most important, Viewpoint also provides an open, compatible architecture for linking design, characterization and production test.

As part of Advantest's commitment to the logic market, the company has product development and product sales partnerships with a number of well-regarded companies that serve logic customers' various needs. As a total solutions provider, Advantest also partners with a number of third-party software developers.

Commitment to Quality
To support product and system excellence, Advantest has an internal quality initiative, QCD+1, which is based on Baldrige Award criteria.

Focused on customer satisfaction, Advantest's quality initiative is implemented by a fully trained staff that puts customer responsiveness as its paramount objective.

The company's commitment to quality extends to its service and applications engineering network, as well as to its manufacturing and development processes.

About Advantest
In the U.S., Advantest America Corporation is headquartered in Santa Clara and employs approximately 250 people in 12 U.S. locations. Advantest America Corporation is the umbrella organization for Advantest America, Inc., Advantest Test Engineering Corporation and for Advantest R&D Center, Inc., all located in Santa Clara.

In its hardware and software, Advantest anticipates test challenges of new generations of integrated circuits, thus amortizing test equipment's cost of ownership while helping to speed products to market with no sacrifice of test excellence. With its track record of innovative and optimized technology and its vision of test solution architecture, Advantest is well positioned to maintain its reputation as the pacesetter for the ATE industry.