<< Is Cymer's DUV laser going to be used in Sun Micro's and Intel's 0.18 micron process?>>
Last I heard, Cymer was counting on the 193nm KrF laser for .18 micron. Lambda-Physik (Coherent), the best I can tell, is concentrating its efforts on competing for the 193nm laser market, and there's no telling who else is in the hunt. Certainly TRW is getting money for EUV research and Komatsu is alive and kicking. My best guess is that the 193nm market will be dominated by Cymer, and both Sun and Intel will still be buying Cymer lasers.
<<And if so, how will they achieve 0.18 micron when every
one else is trying to get to 0.25 micron from the current 0.35 micron?>>
Intel and Sun, like a lot of others, are currently developing fabrication lines designed to make chips with etches down to .25um. They won't get to .18um until "everyone else" does, which could be 1999 or 2001, depending on who you listen to.
<<Also, do you believe that the 0.18 micron process will result in
relatively low-priced products compared to today's 0.35 micron process?>> Not so much low-priced as more powerful, although there is certainly a price component at the cutting edge. They are spending this money to make chips that cannot be made, for practical purposes, without using smaller lines. I don't know how much the combination of copper connectivity with .25um lines will forestall this. But the big issue with smaller lines is making chips more powerful and/or faster, not cheaper. The focus on making currently available mass-produced consumer chips "cheaper" is increasing the size of the wafers (from which the chips are cut) 300mm instead of 200mm, which will result (if all goes well) in over twice as many chips from each wafer.
I don't know if the smaller architechtural features will eventually result in cheaper chips in consumer IC's or not. Maybe someone else could say whether this is on the table. If the technology for cutting the smaller lines becomes reasonable in price, you could conceivably see smaller microprocessors, for example, which would help costs in several ways. But this is way beyond me. |
