June 7, 2007 – Integrated Dynamics Engineering Inc. (IDE), headquartered in the US and Germany, says it has sold its line of wafer packers and wafer sorters to Austrian firm Ricmar Technology GmbH for an unidentified amount.

The new owner will manufacture the systems in Austria under its own brand and take over servicing for existing IDE customers. Products included in the deal include 200mm and 300mm wafer packer systems, with patent-pending end effectors for handling thin wafers and for precise placement of interleaf materials.

Ricmar says the deal complements moves it has made over the past several years to bolster its lineup of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and services offerings. “For our current and future customers, it is a win-win situation, concentrating more of what they need in one convenient source, the Ricmar network,” said Gerhard Zeindl, president of Ricmar Technology, in a statement.

IDE, which has historically focused on critical subsystems and components, ultimately “had to decide between being an end user or an OEM-focused company,” because “being both, we felt, diluted our primary strength,” according to company president Peter Heiland. “This sale of our end-user products now allows us to concentrate all our energy on our critical OEM customers.”