ICOS wins orders for tape-inspection products

MARCH 20--ICOS Vision Systems Corp. N.V. (Heverlee, Belgium; www.ICOS.be) has received two orders for its TAB tape-inspection products. The orders include stand-alone FTI systems, as well as system-level OEM products and have a value of about 800,000 euros.

TAB tape provides the interconnect for Tape Carrier Packages (TCPs) and Chip on Flexible Printed Circuits (COF) that are used extensively in flat-panel displays, disk drives, and other applications. The ICOS systems can inspect the TAB tape, TCP, and COF. As the connections on the tape get smaller, more automatic inspection will be necessary to inspect these tapes.

Anton DeProft, president and CEO of ICOS, comments: "These orders are an important milestone in the process to replace the human inspection with automatic inspection in this rapidly growing market. We now work together with several key suppliers in the field that together hold more than 50% of the market for TAB tape. Therefore, we believe that automatic inspection will become the norm and that we may well become the standard in this growing market."