XLS Stepper Upgrade

The XLS stepper was the last of the line of products from GCA and the technology was eventually purchased by Ultratech. The original operating software ran under SunOS 4.1.4 on a Sun SparcStation2 . The XLS stepper hardware contained it's own smart controllers (a VMEbus chassis built around the Motorola 68000 series microcomputer) and used the Sparcstation software as the user interface.

We have ported the SunOS software to a standard desktop PC running Linux (the Ubuntu distribution) and have temporarily set up a VNC connection to this machine. You can access it at the address trilicium.dyndns.org:3 using the password XlsStep2. Any VNC client will do - UltraVNC and TightVNC are typical. If our emulation connection is down and you really want to try it out then you can contact us at the link below. Some sample screen captures from this emulation are shown below

One of the obvious advantages to moving the software to a PC, besides the reliability improvements and the modern hardware, is that the stepper can be run from any device on the network with VNC capabilities e.g. workstations, laptops and handheld devices (Apple iTouch/iPad etc). The stepper could also be controlled or monitored remotely over the internet. In theory, with proper TCP/IP port redirection, it might be possible to house the actual stepper control machine at a remote location i.e. outside of the clean room and still operate the stepper (we haven't actually tried it)

If you would like further information or have any questions then please let us know.

Sample screen images