Reaffirms Technical Leadership and Commitment to the "Tool Node" of Fab-Wide Agile Automation

FREMONT, Calif.- July 11, 2008 -- Asyst Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ASYT), the leader in Agile Automation™, today announced the launch of the Falcon Integrated Loadport, an entirely new high-performance loadport that demonstrates industry-leading reliability and cost-of-ownership. The Falcon receives, opens, and closes wafer carriers (the fundamental job of a loadport) approximately twice as fast as available competitive products. Asyst has shipped beta units to two top-five equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and to a top-five IC manufacturer. The company has accelerated pilot production of the product at its highly efficient Asia-based production facilities with the expectation of volume availability by the fourth quarter of 2008.

Asyst pioneered the loadport market with its Standard Mechanical Interface (SMIF™) products of the 1980's and 1990's. Early in the new millennium, the company continued its technical leadership in loadports with the IsoPort™ Integrated Loadport, a product that continues to perform at or above industry requirements for performance and reliability. With the Falcon, Asyst has significantly raised the bar in performance, reliability, and cost-of-ownership, while at the same time implementing technologies that will ensure smooth user migration to next-generation Agile Automation solutions and even larger wafers.

“The Falcon reaffirms Asyst's commitment to the loadport as a critical enabling technology for overall tool performance and reliability, and evidences our unique recognition of the loadport's importance to total factory performance at the Tool Node of any fab-wide automation system,” said Grant Imper, Vice President and General Manager, IC Components, for Asyst. “We are working with leading OEMs and end users to ensure that Falcon meets and exceeds all fab requirements and fulfills its design objective as the highest performance, most reliable, and easiest to integrate loadport on the market. We also are working with our supply chain to ensure that the Falcon will have industry-leading short lead times and time-to-volume, which will make Falcon an ideal platform for our OEM partners.”

About Asyst

Asyst Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated automation solutions that enable semiconductor and flat panel display (FPD) manufacturers to increase their manufacturing productivity and protect their investment in materials during the manufacturing process. Encompassing isolation systems, work-in-process materials management, substrate-handling robotics, automated transport and loading systems, and connectivity automation software, Asyst's modular, interoperable solutions allow chip and FPD manufacturers, as well as original equipment manufacturers, to select and employ the value-assured, hands-off manufacturing capabilities that best suit their needs. Asyst's homepage is http://www.asyst.com.

Forward Looking Statements

Except for statements of historical fact, the statements in this release are forward-looking. The forward-looking statements include statements regarding product capabilities and availability, and other factors more fully detailed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2008, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. These factors include, but are not limited to, the availability and performance of our new Falcon products; the ability of our new Falcon products to meet customer requirements; uncertainties related to the pace or outcome of customer evaluations of our new Falcon products; our ability and schedule to ramp production of our new Falcon products; future demand for new Falcon products; and other factors more fully detailed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2008, and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"Asyst" is a registered trademark and "Falcon", "Agile Automation", "SMIF" and IsoPort are trademarks of Asyst Technologies, Inc. Copyright 2008, Asyst Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.