Invisix steps out from under ASML’s wings with soft X-ray metrology bet

A new Dutch semiconductor equipment startup is emerging from a familiar breeding ground. Rooted in more than a decade of R&D at ASML, Invisix is taking aim at a pressing issue for semiconductor manufacturers: how to measure increasingly complex 3D chip structures with sufficient accuracy and speed.

Such metrology is a core business of ASML, but the lithography focuses on measurements that can be used in feedback loops that directly improve scanner performance. Technology with a wider process-control scope falls outside that scope, but Invisix’s soft X-ray scatterometry was deemed sufficiently promising to spin out.