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Technology Stocks : General Lithography
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To: jeffbas who wrote (1019)5/28/1998 10:18:00 PM
From: Ian@SI  Read Replies (1) of 1305
 
Jeff,

Yes, I have 2 reasons to believe that the V2000 may offer advantages in specific circumstances.

1. Art said so.

2. Some of Art's engineers issued a paper with stats that said so.

RE 1. Saw a videoclip on the net from the AEA investor's conference in which Art gave out some extremely impressive Performance stats. These were discussed by myself and others on both the UTEK and ETEC threads about 6-7 months ago.

Re 2. UTEK IR sent me a copy of the paper entitled "Evaluation of a Next-Generation Vector Electron Beam Mask Pattern Lithography System". Paper was presented to BACUS 1997(#3236-61) and is probably in the public domain.

An extract from section 3.0 of the paper is relevant to the spec problem ETEC ran into.

... The V2000 incorporates a new writing strategy referred to as the "soft boundaries" writing strategy, shown in Figure 4. ... With the soft boundaries writing strategy in the new format, the absence of rigid cell boundaries means that figures do not have to be cut on cell boundaries and stripe boundaries as was previously necessary. The elimination of butting errors in critical dimensions results in improved CD uniformity performance. ...

[bold print added by me.]

Ironically, ETEC emphasized, in their conference call, how important "butting errors" would be to resulting yields. I've never seen UTEK say anything that hypes (perhaps "proclaims" may be a better verb) their "butting" advantage.

RE ETEC valuation issue: ETEC owns the market, or at least more than 75% of it and probably close to 100% at the very high end. The overall mask equipment market is expected to grow more rapidly than the sector. ETEC could lose 25% of the market share to UTEK and still have sector beating growth. I mean, their guidance was for only 20% growth. Yeahhh, sure. Nothing like setting the bar low.

I have no idea how the market will perceive the fortunes / valuations of either company short term.

Ian.
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