Regarding SVGL, you wrote:
>>"if we build it, they will come...
and buy." I had that sense, along with the perspective that they
had a technical edge on the step & scan niche for the 0.25 DUV market.<<
The problem is not in the second half of that sentence, but in the first half. Building scanners is a lot tougher than building baseball parks. Their leading edge system (193 nm) is *not* a production ready tool. That's okay, for now, because no one else has a production tool either, but there's a long long distance, in both design and manufacturing, between one or two R&D machines and 200 production machines.
As far as the 0.25 micron step & scan niche goes, my recent conversations with litho people suggest that it's by no means obvious that the market wants step & scan tools right now, particularly from a vendor whose future stability is by no means assured. See
news.semiconductoronline.com
for more details. Briefly, step-and-scan is the wave of the future, but litho people always want to delay the future as long as they can keep current technology working at a reasonable cost.
Now, with all that said, I still have a pretty positive feeling about SVG. I've met a lot of the people there, and they've got some good brains working on the problems. They've also managed to make some pretty important friends among the US chipmakers, all of whom would dearly love to have a domestic source for advanced lithography. The question is whether that's enough in the face of the huge amounts of money that advanced litho development requires, and the huge revenues that the big guys have to throw at it.
Katherine |
