*AV*--I guess it is time to re-state that my area of expertise over the past 22 years has been lithography. While I am checking up on some concerning info brought to my attention recently, I am a very strong believer and supporter of the advances being made in lithography that will propel the device technology down below 0.10u and possibly to 0.05u before having to implement other strategies.
You should also know that I will go on record to say that a "one-of-a-kind" controlled lab experiment proves everything in the future feasibility of lithographic technology. One in a row proves it can be done. All that remains is to figure out how to do it repeatably and cost effectively. These barriers will be overcome. There are too many tricks of the trade, to many creative lithographers and equipment suppliers, and way too many dedicated individuals to all it to fail.
Keep in mind that these startling events are coming years before they were expected, according to Moore's Law. Therefore, there is plenty of time to bring this to fruition. Candidly, I do not think a design library exists today to take advantage of 0.07u lines nor are the other process technologies in existence to provide the film thickness, depositions, metallizations, etal. to create the active devices that could be printed. This is a very complicated puzzle so we should not lose sight of the other hurdles to implementing 0.07u lithography. It is no good without a design library or others processes that can leverage the feature sizes that can be printed.
Finally, what we are discussing amounta to no more than how small feature sizes are resolved. It is a matter of optical vs e-beam vs x-ray vs who knows lithographic techniques. The events listed are very significant from the perspective of the technique used to resolve the feature sizes. No one should think that resolving a 0.07u line or space is a major accomplishment. This has already been done via e-beam or x-ray, I would gather. The significance it that it was done using DUV lithography which extends the life of certain companies like ASMLF, Canon, Nikon, ISI, and SVGL for exposure tools along with CYMI for DUV sources. It also allows MASK, DPMI, and PLAB to extend their reticle tooling capabilities and viability utilizing close to the same materials and techniques being employed presently (X-ray reticles require a whole different set of mask blanks and processing steps to manufacture).
Andrew
BTW-On a slightly different subject, I found this news release quite interesting especially since WDC is down $2 today and reported a bad quarter. Keep in mind that this is a real late night release. Those early risers that see this before the market opens may feel comfortable that a slight disk drive rally could be touched off by the early herd mentality looking for some refuge from the chaos<GGG>
Tuesday April 28, 11:30 pm Eastern Time
Read-Rite says industry bottomed in March
SAN FRANCISCO, April 28 (Reuters) - Read-Rite Corp president Alan Lowe said that the disk drive industry bottomed in March, and he is still confident that his company will see 10 to 20 percent sequential
revenue growth in the third quarter.
''I'm confident with our projections (that the company made on its conference call with analysts),'' Lowe told a Hambrecht & Quist Technology conference here. ''March was definitely the bottom.''
Lowe said that March was an ''ugly quarter'' for the disk drive industry, referring to a quarter that has been fraught with a glut of disk drive inventories, price cuts, financial losses and even layoffs at some disk drive makers.
''The level of inventory among OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) has been reduced,'' Lowe said.
In its fiscal second quarter, Read-Rite, a maker of recording heads and head assemblies for disk drives, reported a net loss of $62.2 million and revenues of $187.1 million, a 34 percent drop versus the year-ago period. |
