Never could get aboard the COHU bandwagon, though I am getting close. On the RTEC front, this is definitely a company we will be getting involved in. As far as CYMI is concerned, I am still a staunch supporter. We have at least 5-10 years in the realm of where CYMI will be viable in the mainstream production arena. 193nm is barely in production and 157nm will be next, and then one more after that. the cost of implementing new processes and building new fabs is becoming more and more prohibitive. One cannot keep building advanced devices and not recoup the costs of the facility too many times before you run yourself out of business.
My belief is that 300mm manufacturing and then the 400mm upgrade will provide some of the cost effective manufacturing needed to offset the need for shrinking devices to ridiculously small levels. In certain cases, 0.07u processing is needed, in many cases it may turn out to be an overkill.
Not that I am saying technology advances will come to a halt, but the more costly the equipment gets, the more likely we will hit a cost point where it just does not make sense to make such a huge investment in equipment and technology for minimal gains. The first steppers were about $1 million apiece and the current generation is getting close to $10 million. the cost of a wafer fab used to be under $500 million and now it is in excess of $2 billion.
We will probably run out of cost benefits real soon and it may very well be cheaper to produce a 0.25u chip on a 200mm or 300mm wafer than to shrink the device in a new fab on a 400mm wafer at 0.12u. you may get less chips per wafer, but you may get a chip at lower die cost. All we need to do is to look at the used equipment market and it is easy to see how you could readily buy a 200mm Fab (LSI fab in Colorado Springs) and buy some fantastic 200mm equipment on the used equipment market to replace anything you do not like, at consoiderable discounts, and run that fab at lower opersating costs than a new 300mm facility. I would hazard a guess that you could run twice the number of 200mm wafers to meet the 300mm equivalent die output at less than half the cost of the 300mm operation.
Anyway, I went out on a tangent, but I do believe there is considerable life in CYMI, well beyond the current market horizon for stock valuation. Of course, after CYMI and the traditional (UV, DUV, EUV) runs completely out of steam, we wonder if X-Ray will ever see the light of day. If so, and it is many years down the road, who knows, JMAR might look decent.
andrew |
