Adventa Control Technologies sold its first commercial license of ControlWORKS, the control software for manufacturing microchips, in 1994. Today, more than 6,000 ControlWORKS systems serve the semiconductor industry.

Semiconductor manufacturers pay millions of dollars for production tools, so they need control software to be infinitely adaptable to their process requirements. Adventa's challenge is to produce a configurable machine-control development framework that delivers a wide range of supervisory functions, as well as embedded real-time control of manufacturing processes.

With Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks, Adventa helps these manufacturers get their tools to market in months instead of years, reduce their control organizations up to 90 percent, and cut maintenance costs with built-in standard processes.