Applied Materials Achieves Milestone Shipment of 1,000th Producer CVD System.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Applied Materials, Inc. has shipped its milestone 1,000th Applied Producer(R) CVD (chemical vapor deposition) system, continuing the company's leadership in the critical CVD market for semiconductor manufacturing. Producer is the industry's most flexible system for depositing an array of dielectric materials, including advanced low k and strain films, that are essential for continuing Moore's Law to 65nm and below chip generations.

"The Applied Producer system is the gold standard for CVD -- used to manufacture virtually every kind of chip design made today," stated Dr. Farhad Moghadam, senior vice president and general manager of Applied Materials' Thin Films Product Business Group. "The Producer system's high-productivity, single-wafer architecture, with simultaneous six-wafer processing capacity, continues to make it the CVD system of choice worldwide. Advanced interface control enables a wide spectrum of materials to be deposited in multi-step sequences with exceptional purity, allowing customers to mix, match and upgrade the system for the emerging 65nm chip generation and for early development of 45nm devices."

A key application of the Producer CVD system is for depositing Applied's proprietary Black Diamond(R) film, the industry's most widely-used low k dielectric material. Over 100 million microprocessors and other state-of-the-art logic chips have been produced using Black Diamond to achieve new levels of power and performance. The implementation of Black Diamond has increased steadily year after year as key chipmakers expand their low k-based products and transition to 90nm and 65nm designs. A new generation of this process is in development to extend its advantages to device generations beyond 65nm, with k-values of less than 2.5.

The Producer system's new HARP(TM) process provides stress-tunable, thermal films for pre-metal dielectric and shallow-trench isolation gap-fill applications, with extendibility to 45nm and beyond. The Producer system also offers an innovative strain-engineered silicon nitride process that is used by virtually all 90nm-generation chip manufacturers to enhance transistor performance. Used together in high-volume manufacturing, the HARP and silicon nitride processes have demonstrated greater than 30% speed improvement in advanced device designs -- without added integration complexity or cost.

Applied Materials, Inc. (Nasdaq:AMAT), headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is the largest supplier of equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry. Applied Materials' web site is www.appliedmaterials.com.