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Technology Stocks : Mattson Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (1759)	9/16/1999 12:47:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 3661

semibiznews.com Equipment throughput is key to achieving higher productivity, says Mattson By Jack Robertson Semiconductor Business News (09/16/99, 11:54:36 AM EDT) TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Brad Mattson, chairman and CEO of Mattson Technology Inc., told a SEMI Semicon Taiwan plenary session here that the greatest hope to continue Moore's Law was to develop higher-throughput chip production gear, not by relying on traditional die shrinks and wafer-size increases. "Die yields and wafer sizes will continue to improve, but at a much slower rate and with diminishing returns," he claimed. "The pace of transitioning to the next-generation 300-mm wafers will actually take twice as long as the shift to 200-mm wafers." Mattson said the best potential to keep Moore's Law on track is to increase fab productivity -- especially in the throughput of equipment. He said this could allow chip firms to maintain the same 18-times increase in productivity over the next 10 years that they achieved in the past 10. Some of the ways he suggested to get such gains included: Adding redundancy to equipment to significantly increase uptime. "Many industries use redundancy in critical operations, but equipment makers have almost never considered it," he said. Reducing the number of process steps, combining several processes in the same tool, and designing chips with fewer masks. He suggested using in situcleaning while processing wafers, rather than a separate cleaning operation. Using more automation and better fab flow to eliminate the backup of wafers and material waiting to be processes. ?Reduce the number of manufacturing buffers, which can play havoc with productivity," the Fremont, Calif.-based executive said. Using new fab architecture to upgrade from the current cluster-tool approach. Mattson suggested a hybrid "small batch" concept, which would combine batch and cluster tools in one operation.