Heard on the Beat: Applied quietly ships new implanter
Silicon Strategies
02/25/2004, 5:20 PM ET
Applied Materials Inc. is reportedly shipping its next-generation, yet-to-be-announced single-wafer ion implanter, dubbed the QuantumX. One of the first implanters is going to Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., according to a report from investment banking firm Mitchell, Detwiler & Co. in Boston.
Texas Instruments Inc. has also ordered Applied's new implanter, which will be installed in its new 300-mm fab in Texas, dubbed DMOS7, according to the report.
With Applied's new tool, the ion-implanter market is heating up. "Looking at the ion implant sector of semiconductor tools, Applied Materials (AMAT), Varian (VSEA), and Axcelis (ACLS) are the top North American vendors," wrote analyst Vincent Valentine in the report. "With the advent of shallow junction transistors as the building block for leading edge ICs, single wafer processing has displaced batch processing," he said in the report.
"VSEA is clearly the leader with significant top feeding activity, followed by AMAT with its new Quantum X implanter, and then there is ACLS. Unfortunately for ACLS, VSEA is the rock with its VIISta platform and AMAT is the hard place, as the Quantum X contains the IP won from the lawsuit levied by ACLS," according to the report.
Last year, Applied claimed victory in its legal battle against Axcelis, saying that a jury ruled that Applied's ion implantation system does not infringe upon a patent owned by Axcelis. In January 2001, Axcelis had filed suit against Applied, asserting that its Swift line of implanters infringed Axcelis' patent, namely U.S. Patent No. 4,667,111. By its verdict, the jury rejected Axcelis' contention (see July 2, 2003 story). |
