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To: Ian@SI who wrote (22169)	6/9/1999 10:25:00 AM
From: Robert Douglas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

An article from PC Magazine appeared on the Intel thread: exchange2000.com Here are a few paragraphs: Fabrication technology must improve in many areas with each successive process generation, such as the move from 0.25-micron design to 0.18. One particularly critical process is photolithography, where short-wavelength light sources are focused with a number of precision lenses and shone through small transparent masks containing circuit details. This exposes the photoresist on a wafer's surface, which is chemically removed leaving microscopic details of the circuit pattern on the wafer. According to Mark Bohr, who is Intel's director of process architecture and integration technology and an Intel Fellow, light sources and optics must evolve in concert. Later this year, Intel will ship 0.18-micron Pentium III chips using the same 248-nm wavelength deep-UV light source as used in current 0.25-micron Pentium II and Pentium III chips. But when moving to 0.13-micron processes three or four years from now, expect to see 193-nm wavelengths using excimer lasers as the light source. Beyond 0.13- could be a 0.09-micron process, which would use 157-nm wavelength excimer lasers, according to Bohr. And the next step below 0.09 is a big one in terms of technology and manufacturing processes: the 0.07-micron process in Grove's processor of 2011. This level of photolithography will likely require extreme-UV (EUV) light sources. EUV has a wavelength of only 13nm, which has long-term potential for etching far smaller transistors but is confounded by the fact that there are no known transparent mask materials that will allow such short wavelengths to pass through. This requires entirely new reflective lithography processes and optics to be implemented coincident with EUV.

To: Ian@SI who wrote (22169)	6/9/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: orkrious	Respond to of 25960

My caution was merely that this is still a cyclical sector; that some valuation algorithms don't hold. FWIW, I also agree, for the little that's worth! <VBG> jay