They have two electron-beam machines in their year-old factory in Rousset and have a third on order.

The company uses an electron-beam machine to etch customers' circuit designs directly onto all of a computer chip's silicon wafers.

Mr. Grand-Clement's idea was to use an electron-beam machine to "direct write" designs onto silicon wafers.

It has 30 electron-beam machines at its East Fishkill, N.Y., semiconductor manufacturing center.

Cartons containing sealed bags of the suspect or tainted material roll on a conveyer belt into a large electron-beam machine.

ES2 computers then translate those designs into etching instructions for the $4 million electron-beam machines, which are made by the Perkin-Elmer Corporation.

(I.B.M., Hitachi and Fujitsu use electron-beam machines to develop their in-house prototype chips.)

The electron-beam group is the other half of Perkin-Elmer's semiconductor operations, and analysts say it has been the leading maker of electron-beam machines in the United States.

At Lepton Inc., a small start-up company based in Murray Hill, N.J., designers are completing a commercial version of a direct-write electron-beam machine known as the EBES-4.

Toshiba Says It Heeded Laws Tetsuo Kadoya, a spokesman for Toshiba, said the company complied with all laws that were in effect in 1985 in selling the electron-beam machine.

More than 1.2 million people from the international community participated, and their names were etched into silicon using an electron-beam machine used for fabricating micro devices at JPL, and this plaque is now installed on the deck of Curiosity.

By doing only the most delicate steps with a direct-write electron-beam machine, the machine could keep pace with the faster optical systems and produce chips more dense than those produced simply with optical systems, said Martin Lepselter, a former Bell Laboratories scientist who is president of Lepton.

Lines Grow More Narrow But as the width of lines on chip circuits has narrowed, "optical steppers are getting slower and more expensive, and direct-write tools are getting faster," said Thomas Halloran, president of Etec Systems, a Hayward, Calif., maker of electron-beam machines.