March 7, 2002 – Woodbury, NY – Veeco Instruments Inc. has entered a distribution agreement with Epion Corp., a JDS Uniphase company, to distribute Epion’s gas cluster ion beam (GCIB) product to the data storage, MRAM, MEMs, photomask, and wireless telecommunications markets.

GCIB is an emerging technology for atomic scale surface smoothing and etching, and is important for improved surface characteristics, increased uniformity, defect reduction, and enhanced performance, the company said. GCIB is available as an integrated module on a cluster tool or as a stand-alone system.

Edward Braun, Veeco’s chairman, CEO, and president, commented, “GCIB is an important new technology vital for the development of next generation high areal density 80 GB/in(2) thin film magnetic heads. It is complementary to Veeco’s broad line of etch, deposition, and metrology systems and may be integrated into existing Veeco cluster tools.”

Epion has established expertise in GCIB technology based on work performed at the Ion Engineering Experimental Laboratory at Kyoto U. in Japan, the company said.