From a semiconductor business news story published Friday,
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Many of the equipment suppliers ended up abandoning their expensive strategies to create 300-mm only tool platforms and, instead, they are hedging their bets with so-called "bridge tools." Nearly all new production tools hitting the market today are on bridge platforms, estimates analyst G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc. in San Jose. "You don't have much choice but to buy a bridge tool if you want the latest technology," he points out.
But bridge tools exacerbate another problem. They make the job of determining the critical cost differences between 200-mm and 300-mm systems even more difficult. "In many cases there is no difference," Hutcheson insists. Many suppliers now admit that it doesn't make any difference whether 300-mm tools are on bridge platforms or dedicated 300-mm systems. They still will cost more than Sematech's target of 1.3 times that of existing 200-mm equipment. Some vendors put the cost premium even higher - between 1.5 to 1.8 times that of 200-mm systems.
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300mm may happen faster than I suspect. If the fab manager is paying up for the 300mm capable tools but not getting the productivity boost, why not just accelerate the plans for the conversion?
At this time most industry pundits are being rather cautious about the rate of the switch. If anything, migrations seem to be happening much more quickly than was the case, not much more slowly.
IMO,
Ian. |
