Oh great. EUV Ltd. (the Intel/Motorola consortium) says it is going to help fund *TRW* to build an YAG to power its (hypothetical) EUV stepper. The wafer fabs have made so much moola that everyone and his brother wants a piece of pie. TRW is talking like it's a piece of cake.
Personally, I'm betting on EUV for the next generation, with x-ray a close second (the wavelengths overlap and you can never be completely sure what someone's talking about without checking the energy source), and I'm betting on Cymer to build the best lamp, with maybe COHR a contender also. I think TRW and the Intel consortium are going to be behind the development curve, $500 million or not.
But the whole race really will be wide open until Sematach narrows the field a little this fall. If you haven't heard, they are holding seminars all over the country trying to pick two or three technologies, to try to limit the hundreds of millions of research dollars that are going to go down the drain with uncompetitive tech research for the .18um and narrower design rules.
On top of this NEC announced that it has built a 14nm transistor using electron beam litho. So you'd better not count Lucent out, either, guys. As awkward as the scan may be, SCALPEL will most likely work and be adaptable to very small design rules. And NEC will build one screamin' memory chip with this size channel.
This is like the discovery of the new world. Nobody fully understands the physics underlying the process -- people are just building ships and sailing west. |
