Escondido, California October 19, 2000

Advanced Recording Technologies, Inc.

Advanced Recording Technologies (A.R.T.) of Escondido, California, announced the details of their new laser based Micro-machining Station. This laser system, called the LASERLITH has been specifically designed to machine tiny objects with precision not before attained in a commercial product. For example, rings and gears less than .002 inches in diameter are easily made from a variety of materials, and letters can be clearly scrolled out which are only .0006 inches high, significantly smaller than a human hair, according to Don Roberts, Project Director.

A.R.T. states that this precision is attained through the use of a highly stable cultured granite housing, coupled to laser controlled interferometer stages. The system has also been designed for very high reliability. A.R.T. achieves this by using diode pumped YAG lasers rather than the more conventional Krypton arc pumped systems. Most diode pumped lasers are designed to meet a mean time between failure of nearly 20,000 hours. As a comparison, a Krypton arc lamp typically lasts between 200 and 400 hours before they fail.

Applications for this system include precision micro-machining of ceramics, metals and glasses, such as ferrite, aluminum oxide, calcium titanate, stainless steel, aluminum titanium carbide and silicon carbide. The tiny gears and wheels can be used in the new field of micro and nano mechanics, where miniaturized mechanisms are used for robotic applications in the biological and medical fields. Tiny strands of various materials can be welded together, as well as seams between two miniature mating surfaces. Marking can be done on objects as small as 5 thousandths of an inch. Holes can be cut with diameters less than .003 inches and .030 inches deep for inner connections on semiconductors and circuit boards. Resistors can be trimmed with production speed in turnkey configurations. The track widths of magnetic recording heads can be trimmed to within 10 micro inches of accuracy. Edges on polished surfaces can be cut faster and as sharp as with diamond tooling, an aid in trimming the air bearing surfaces of recording heads.

The LASERLITH includes a number of options. For instance, many types of lasers can be installed in the system. These include diode pumped YAG and YLF, Q switched, mode locked, doubled, tripled, C02, nitrogen, pulsed or continuous. A vision system can be programmed to automatically find, measure and trim targets within a few millionths of an inch. The auto focus feature keeps the laser continuously in focus during and between laser cutting operations. A built in zoom feature provides a 6:1 range with screen magnifications up to 5000 and special beam shaping optics enable the user to ablate surfaces into a variety of custom shapes. A custom script language is provided by A.R.T. which is similar to HPGL. This enables the user to write his own micro-machining programs without the need to know the more complicated general-purpose languages such as C or Pascal.

The first production unit with vision system optics and auto focus has been delivered to a major computer peripherals manufacturer.