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Technology Stocks : General Lithography

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To: Andrew Vance who wrote (958)	4/26/1998 7:20:00 AM
From: Carl Mays	Read Replies (3) of 1305

Andrew, I am very familiar with the ISI situation and the transition from GCA. I would have to disagree with your comment regarding the ISI technology being superior to GCA because it is the same technology. The ISI XLS was developed by GCA in 1990 and all of the i-line and duv lenses that are configured with the tool were developed by Tropel at the same time. ISI only offers two i-line lenses and they are both 10 year old technology. The widefield i-line lens (called the 2955i) that Tropel developed in 1990 can no longer be manufactured because of difficult manufacturing tolerances and the fact that Tropel removed the unique test beds required when General Signal got out of the business. ISI has left all of their 2955 customers high and dry because of the elimination of the 2955 product. It is a 4x lens which is certainly unique for a .5 micron product offering. Customers that need additional capacity are forced to purchase another tool set with the industry standard 5x lens and must bear the mask retooling costs which can be very substantial for an ASIC fab. ISI continues to offer 2 very old i-line offerings: a Tropel 2145 and a Minolta 2548. The 2145 (21mm diameter, .45 fixed NA) has major deterioration problems and all of the lenses in the field are going bad. Transmission deteriorates from 70% to 30% and uniformity goes out of spec very quickly requiring that appodizers to be placed in the illumination system causing serious additional throughput problems. ISI lost Motorola over the 2145 issue and all others users are very upset about it. The Minolta 2548 (25mm diameter, .48 fixed NA) lens is a new ISI offering but an old lens. This is the lens that was used in the Hitachi stepper and is about 10 years old. This lens has no temp or barometric pressure control so you can imagine the difficulty controlling focus and mag in production. The duv and scalpel programs have many problems as well. ISI has not developed or improved any features on the XLS which is the base platform for all of their tools. Same stages, handler, illuminator, RMS and poor throughput. The rampup problem was never an issue because ISI never shipped these tools in quantity. They have manufactured only about ten systems from scratch. All others were systems transferred from GCA or repurchased from DEC when they sold them out of their fab. Their are many problems such as the lens issue that I am concerned will harm UTEKs fine reputation, that is why I am very interested in the ISI buyout. UTEK's revenue has declined for 7 straight quarters and adding a series of outstanding issues could be very harmful as UTEK works it's way through this down period.

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