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Technology Stocks : General Lithography

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To: Demosthenes who wrote (1189)	2/28/2000 11:23:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance	of 1305

This story has made the rounds today and I think it started here with a private message. Your comments are correct about e-beam and Utrabeam. The real issue is that e-beam has been the next generation of lithography after UV-DUV runs it course for more than a decade. Somehow we managed to find ways to keep e-beam in the back rooms. The new articles about PSM or OPC with 248nm systems as well as the early UT articles using CYMI Lasers for 0.08u features all lead me to believe that we cannot count out DUV yet. There is still a synchrotron ring for X-ray litho in Munich, I think, at an institute. the time will come for e-beam, make no mistake about it. I just do not see it in the very near future based on cost and throughput. Now there is the rub, cost and throughput. This is why I put a great deal of emphasis in a prior reply here relative the UTEK and the Ultrabeam. IF (and boy do I mean IF in capital letters) a cost effective, relatively high throughput, direct write system like the Ultrabeam actually come to fruition, it could displace DUV in certain niche manaufacturing sites where the manufacturing enterprise is based on high mix and low volumes. Direct write eliminates the need for reticles, which are now becoming one of the most costly parts of the process. Being able to prototype devices and make numerous design changes on a wafer prior to going into production would allow for the qualification of a device on a wafer. Think about it. You could alter the design slightly to run the full specification limits for the device all on one wafer and see how robust the design is through the rest of the process steps. I have high hopes for direct write technology but I still see a solid future for DUV over the next 3-5 years, at a minimum. This is too far out to be worried about. HOWEVER, I must admit that a limited use of e-beam for super crtical levels like gate definition could be done in a mix and match configuration for specific devices. Who knows, this might be the ticket for the advanced processors with the 1.2 GHz and above speeds and eliminate the binning of parts by speed.<GGG> AV

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