Curly,
Re your 3 guesses?
Would it be Coherent? or Comatsu? Oh, you said the first 2 don't count. I guess the only other "C" laser company must be CYMER. ;-)
I2,
In the past, CYMI has sold the lasers that its customers needed. It's a small company with limited resources and couldn't be all things to all people. Rather it stuck to its core business and did it well.
Can a monopoly be broken? Certainly, in a mature product, eventually someone will come along and take some share. It happened to IBM, it is happening to CPQ, and at some time it will happen to CYMI. I just don't believe that will occur in the next 10 years.
Rather, I expect that CYMI lasers will continue to be the superiour choice for production use.
I would also observe, that for R&D usage, any laser may do. ASMLF has publicly acknowledged that they intend to have a better performing scanner than the current 193nm version; there's no reason to believe that SVGI will stick with LP's laser neither.
In the interim, the lithography vendors may be attempting to reduce CYMI's margins more than if they just blindly ordered CYMI lasers.
Time will certainly provide the definitive answer.
Ian. |
