Ultratech Stepper Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Ultratech Stepper

UTEK 30.23

0.0%

Jun 5 5:00 PM EST

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: donss who wrote (1939)	12/26/1997 2:11:00 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (2) of 3696

I saw this on the news on TV last night and wondered what the implications were also. I'll try my best with the 2nd one. In a nutshell. Moores Law says you double performance every two yrs. Thus a 200MHZ MMX is what I bought last Jan, today you can get 300 MHz and probably next yr we will see 400MHz PCs for home use. This same progression goes for memory as well so the overall system performance doubles every two yrs. To double performance you need to reduce the IC feature size by the square root of two (since features go in two dimensions). Thus a system with 0.25um features will run twice as fast if you shrink the features to 0.25um*0.707=0.18um. This breakthrough goes all the way to 0.05um so the performance improvement is up to (.25/.05)^2 or 25 times! What the news and the articles say is though SOME of the IC processes may get ahead of Moores Law, you still have alot more "infrastructure" that also needs to double. For example, to go from the 486 to the Pentium and get any real improvement we needed the PCI bus. To go above a 233 MHz P5/P6 we needed a different "slot" to get the data in and out as fast as the PC CPU is going up in performance hence we got the PII which would be the P7 (or 40786 in the old style). More expamles of problems. If you are running 25 times faster, then you have to get rid of heat faster (probably somewhere between 5 and 25 times more heat) so you need a whole new package technology. Liguid Nitrogen might work, but I doubt this will be in a home machine in only 4 yrs. Hope this helps. It is really pretty interesting and puts the challenge to the rest of the industry. Anyone have a clue of what the breakdown voltage is that could be supported with a 0.05um process? This would need to be at least a Vt or about 0.5 Volts with exotic processing and really would be easier if it supported 1.2 volts. regards Kirk out suite101.com

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next