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Technology Stocks : Cymer (CYMI)
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To: TechHunter who wrote (9420)11/14/1997 12:28:00 AM
From: Maxwell  Read Replies (2) of 25960
 
Direct Copper and CYMER:

<<..he thought DUV had the lead, but direct copper was a serious challenger. Maxwell, is this a serious threat? Is it more cost effective? At how low a micron level can direct copper be effective?>>

Benefits of Copper:

1) Copper, used in interconnect instead of Aluminum, will reduce the resistance of the metal lines by 50%! The speed of the chip is limited by the RC time delay of the circuitry, where R=resistance and
C=capacitance. Because R is reduced the time delay RC also decreases. Thus the speed of the chip is faster.

For example, Intel is currently building a Pentium II chip 300MHz using .35um process and aluminum interconnects. Had they used copper interconnect they can increase the speed beyond 300MHz easily due to low RC in their circuitry. Furthermore the POWER DISSIPATION also drops because the power is given as I^2*R where I=current.

2) Copper is also a cheaper process. The process used is electropating instead of physical vapor deposition (PVD) like in aluminum. Deposition requires vacuum chambers which are costly whereas electroplating requires simple sink and it can deposit at a faster rate than PVD. Remember higher throughput in semiconductor implies lower cost of manufacturing.

The way copper process works is as followed. Trenches are etched in the oxide insulating layer using dual damascene process. Then a seed layer of copper is deposited (about < 500 angstrom) using CVD and then the bulk of copper is deposited using electroplating. Then the whole wafer is polished away till it reaches the oxide surface. All the copper in the trenches are now "metal lines" for conducting electricity.

Benefits of Shrinking the Chip to 0.25um and beyond:

1) When you go to lower dimension you can operate a transistor at lower voltage. Lower voltage means the chip will run alot cooler than larger devices.

2) Smaller geometry means that the metal lines are reduced and thus the RC delays are also smaller. Thus smaller chip runs at higher speed. For example, Intel Pentium of 0.35um can run up to 233MHz. As
soon as they shrink to smaller geometry the speed jumps to 266MHz and 300MHz easily.

3) Smaller geometry implies that your chip is smaller and thus you can get more chips per wafer. This drives the cost/chip down tremenduously. Smaller chip size allows designers to make the chip more powerful since they can add in more transistors without increase the chip size (compared to .35um) to make it more powerful.

For example, AMD K6 chip 0.35um has die size about 163mm^2 of 8.8M transistors. As soon as they go to 0.25um the die size shrunk to 68mm^2. AMD will introduce the K6+-3D next year built on 0.25um with 256K L2 cache of 22.5M transistors with die size ONLY 135mm^2! This will be one hell of a powerful chip. Similarly Intel will introduce the Merced built on 0.18um.

As you can see, CYMI falls into category 2 of smaller geometry. Companies can use copper now with their current 0.35um to make the chip faster without using CYMI laser lithography. However if companies want to make powerful microprocessor they must go to smaller geometry 0.25um and beyond to achieve a reasonable manufacturable die size. This means they must use CYMER lithography. They can also use copper to give them additional speed boost on the 0.25um process and beyond.

Personally I don't believe in x-ray technology. It is not because it is a poor technology. The reason is that it is cost feasible. You don't get that much out for the huge budget and pain you put in.

Maxwell
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