The pace and cost of technological innovation continues to accelerate, and customers face significant obstacles to maintaining or improving their profitability in highly competitive markets. A key contributor to their continued profitability is technological products designed to significantly lower overall costs by maximizing the efficiency of their manufacturing processes, reducing capital costs, and minimizing the time to ramp new processes and deliver new products. ATMI's customers include many of the leading semiconductor and flat-panel display manufacturers in the world who target leading edge technologies.

ATMI is investing in high productivity development capabilities that allow it to rapidly screen thousands of new materials at the earliest research stages, and then run dozens of simultaneous experiments. This allows rapid resolution to complex customer problems. ATMI is now able to accomplish in weeks what once might take months.

ATMI develops products that provide significant operating value for critical manufacturing processes. For example:

• The RegenSiÔ test wafer cleaning product improves wafer reclamation by up to 50%, extends test wafer usage by up to 400%, significantly reduces new wafer purchases, and reduces reclamation time by half.

• The AutoCleanÔ product improves ion implant tool performance through improved cleaning cycles, vastly reduces downtime related to "glitching," enhances trouble-shooting, and enables predicted maintenance.

• The CMPlicityÔ product significantly improves the economics of chemical mechanical planarization with a modular solution that enables superior process control and better tool-to-tool matching. It offers higher throughput, leading to significant direct and indirect cost savings.

ATMI is leveraging its considerable semiconductor materials packaging expertise to benefit the specialized needs of ultra-pure, high-precision biopharmaceutical manufacturing with ATMI LifeSciences' products for handling, storing, and delivering critical materials reliably. These manufacturing processes are encountering the increasing process integrity and efficiency issues that semiconductor companies have already faced.