by Debra Vogler, senior technical editor, SST

March 10, 2010 – Crossing Automation appears to be riding the crest of a wave generated in part by last year’s acquisition of Asyst Technologies, which added front-end atmospheric components to its business. Robert MacKnight, president/CEO, told SST that the company’s strong growth in orders was spurred mainly by multiple new design wins for its Spartan, Falcon and IsoPort technologies, as well as strong repeat business for these products as well as 200mm products and RFID systems.

MacKnight believes that the keen interest on the part of end-users is due in part to the company’s new approach to the OEM and IDM community, which he claims has put the company "a year ahead of schedule in terms of revenue and realized earnings."

The company is focusing efforts on providing subsystem modules for substrate automation through direct collaboration with OEMs to enable faster time-to-market, lower development costs, greater configurability, and lower inventory costs. Prior to the acquisition, Crossing had already developed a set of vacuum-compatible modules and a system controller design for wafer-level automation based on these principles. "Backed by strong financials, we are now able to focus on bringing our modular approach to market to provide more configuration choices at a highly competitive price point while driving cycle time down significantly to maximize flexibility for end-users," he added.

The current roadmap calls for integrating the two product sets into the same modular delivery approach in order to offer a complete end-to-end automation solution to the OEM.