Daily News Briefs

Positive Light announced it is now directly selling service parts for Ti:sapphire amplifiers. For the past 12 years, Positive Light has used Spectra-Physics as a distributor for Spitfire, Hurricane and TSA amplifiers and Evolution and Merlin pump lasers. Positive Light designs and manufactures advanced solid-state lasers for science and industry, including deep-UV lasers, DPSS Q-switched green lasers, ultrafast Ti:sapphire amplifiers, terawatt lasers and custom-built solid-state lasers. The company was acquired by Coherent Inc. in March. . . . Applied Materials Inc. and Agilent Technologies Inc. announced they have developed benchmarks for testing the electrical reliability of new copper and low k materials used in chip making. The resulting characterizations of these materials have been shown to optimize and speed the development of equipment and production specifications for manufacturing advanced interconnects, the companies said. The project was conducted at Applied Materials' Maydan Technology Center facility in Santa Clara, Calif., using the Agilent parallel parametric reliability (PPR) test system. Applied Materials uses the Agilent PPR for emerging 90-nm and 65-nm applications. . . . Ultratech Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based supplier of photolithography systems used to manufacture semiconductors and nanotechnology devices, announced that SAE Magnetics (H.K.) Ltd. a manufacturer of magnetic recording heads and head assemblies for computer disk drives, has placed an order for multiple Ultratech NanoTech 190 lithography steppers. SAE Magnetics, a subsidiary of TDK Corp., will use the Ultratech systems for patterning of air-bearing surfaces of advanced thin-film heads for disk drive applications. The NanoTech 190 systems were installed at SAE's Dongguan manufacturing site in China.