A system for the integrated archiving, restoring, purging, importing and
exporting of semiconductor wafer data, the system including a data
acquisition system for acquiring scan data from differing types of
semiconductor wafer scanning tools such as wafer dimensional tools, wafer
inspection tools, and wafer nanotopography tools, a buffer system for
providing temporary storage for scan data transmitted over a network from
the data acquisition system and for providing fault tolerance, a server
system for providing storage for the scan data transmitted from the
buffer system and converting the scan data into a format used by and
stored in a database management system; and an analysis system client
station including a display and communicating with the server system over
the network, the analysis system and the server system managing the
purging, archiving, restoring, importing and exporting of scan data.