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Technology Stocks : General Lithography
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To: Joe Dancy who wrote (314)5/13/1997 3:15:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance   of 1305
 
Keyword is prototyping ASICs. The direct write laser process has very low throughput. A company called CHIP EXPRESS has been doing the same thing for a few years.

The advantage to this is the ability to do multiple projects on a wafer and to minimize the number of re-designs on the production tooling set. The mark of a poor design house is their inability to understand their design library and their manufacturing partners' capabilities. The capability described in the article is a godsend to those companies that cannot design their product right the first time.

However, credit should be given to this type of situation because they can indeed shorten the design-prototype-production implementation cycle. You can and will get working silicon from the design board much fast. However, as the article states, this is prototyping products.

This will NOT put Mask, PLAB, DPMI out of business. It may affect them to the point that there may be less re-design cycles of learning that require tooling. Even an improperly designed device does not normally require a complete retooling of the entire reticle set. Usually it is a 3 or 4 layer fix that is implemented.

FYI- those of us that use UTEK steppers have, at times, placed prototype reticles on line that have multi-device layouts (projects) or design iterations within a reticle set to shorten the design to production cycle. The cost associated with this is minimal when spread out over multiple designs. Final tooling costs are equivalent since the laser process is just for prototyping. You still need to put the part into high volume production which these laser systems cannot provide.

Andrew
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