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Technology Stocks : General Lithography
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To: Bob Pack who wrote (557)9/9/1997 4:18:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance   of 1305
 
That is a difficult request for a number of reasons. If you tell me how much resist you use a month (as an IC supplier), I can guess very accurately your starts rate, possible WIP, fab capacity, and maybe wafer costs, amongst other things. Resist usage is a closely guarded secret at many places. If we could track resist usage by semiconductor company we could accurately predict the health of the industry. As usage goes down, you have more underutilized capacity and higher wafer cost.

The resist vendors and suppliers also keep these numbers close to the vest. there are ways of getting this type of information though (my personal trade secrets) that provided you with harmless data, readily shared, that will give a good assessment of resist usage.

One such trick is to "schmooze" with the mask/reticvle suppliers and constantly ask what % of the reticles shipped are at a certain feature or less. In other words, if you ask the question correctly you can get a good handle on the answer.

Case in point, no one wants to share their starts capacity of their wafer fab but they will gladly tell you how many pieces of a certain tool they have in use. Ask the right question and you are within 5% of the starts capacity.

I will try to see if I can find a method to indicate DUV usage in the industry. I love a challenge.

Andrew
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