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

To: Qualified Opinion who wrote (1156)	2/11/2000 3:11:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1305

I am a firm believer in past perfromacne is a decent indicator of future performance since history does seem to repeat itself more times than not. More than 15 years ago, I was at Semicon West pouring over x-ray scanners from a company called Micronics<sp> where tales of optical lithography reaching its limits at 1u or 2u. For the same period of time, I had been attending the SPIE conferences and the special sessions on X-ray, e-beam, and laser lithography. One of the first synchotrons was installed in Munich more than a decade ago and surrounded the building. So a case can be made that x-ray lithogrpahy is an old technology. Jump ahead - look at Genus Corporation's history from Thin Film producer to phasing that out in favor of High Energy Implanters (MeV), then selling that business (MeV)and reverting back to the thin film business. People remember the junk they sold years ago and are skeptical to give them a shot. If you are a strong believer in not heeding past mistakes, GGNS is a helluva deal right now. As far as Phillips and Sematech are concerned, Phillips was backing ASML for further research and advancement of the product line. Sematech was essentially funding SVGI with government dollars to get yhe company on track again. What SVGI delivered to Sematech was not production worthy and SVGI did not have the resources to correct the deficiencies. At least this is the way it was viewed by many of us. I would also suggest you go back and do a nice patent search on step and scan lithogrpahy. You may be surprised who holds the patent for it. As far as your exuberance for the company, it might very well be a laggard whose time has come. But please do not laud the Procell over anyone head. I suggest you attend Semicon this year and check out the competition. SVGI does not distinguish themselves from the pack. I would also ask you to cehck out BTU International and TEL for furnaces and see that SVGI's leadership postion is shrinking. As far as PEs are concerned, PEs mean absolutely nothing when you have astronomcal PEs for Internet stocks that have yet to make money. You also have high PEs within our sector. If PE was the determining factor for an investment, WFR would lead the pack. My point is that I do not see what you see at this point in time. You have obviously been stricken with the potential of SVGI well in advance of the masses. There is nothing wrong with that since I have had the same with some stocks I follow. I am just not on the same page as you yet, and I may never be. And for the moment, my investments and retrun on investments bear out that the actions taken so far has been correct. My investments in ASML were much more lucrative than in UTEK and SVGI. My investment in FSII was also more lucrative. I am not disagreeing with you, all I am doing is evaluating the timeliness and making sure that SVGI does not falter again. You are giving me the impression that SVGL is coming out of no where and is going to put its competitors out of business. You are way too bullish on SVGI at this stage of the game while I am just neutral. There is no reason to inundate us with all of the "things to come" since in this industry "things to come" sometimes are delayed, like x-ray lithography. Furthermore, discussion of next generation lithography is absurd, IMHO, since we have 0.18, 0.15 (or 0.13) and 0.10 micron technology to deal with using the existing DUV framework. Why even start discussions on topics that have a very low probability of seeing the light of day for widespread production implementation for the next 3 or more years. Lets stop dwelling on the past. VLSI research has SVGI'S 193 nm lithography tool leading the race. SVGI has boosted its litho tool throughput to create cost efficiency. This should open up the Dram market to SVGI. There is substantial interest in their new Procell photoresist tools. The past is how everyone got the present and VLSI Research does not make Integrated Circuits for a living. VLSI Research does not have a perfect track record so taking things out of context may not be appropriate, just like the dismal failure of mix and match litho. Yuo see it as a failure yet those of us that were smart enough to implement it reaped huge rewards. We can effectively throw away all of the UTEK systems today knowing full well they served their purposes and saved us enough money to replace them with themore advanced toolsets. "Walk a mile in the shoes of those that have succeeded and not those that did not have the vision to belly up to the bar."<ggg> While VLSI may think SVGI is leading the race at 193nm, why aren't you alsouting the accomplishments down at the University of Texas-Austin where CYMI's advanced laser and the ISI stepper produced sub 0.10u dimensions. In my book this is more significant of things to come, along with SCALPEL. We won't settle anything here on the matter since we have a difference of opinion. But in the end we are both monitoring the stock and if you are right, you have the investment just a few dollars cheaper than I. My investment was on 12/28/99 at $18.44, when it was put into the RadarView Mutal Fund 2000, so I cannot complain about my return. I just have a more tempered approach to the stock and am not ready to wave the flag. As long as it keeps performing, so be it. But for the prior 18 months before 12/28, it was not worthy of being in my portfolio. BTW - I must admit an error. I stated it was in that "fund" and did not give it credit for being one of the reasons it was up as much as it was. I mistakenly stated that it had not been a contributor to the gains. I apologize for that. The "fund" was up 51% since 12/28 as of yesterday's close and SVGI did its part to reach that lofty valuation. PS - I think Katherine might have even done a story on the UT-Austin work and I think I might know where to find the patent,s o I will try to locat it this weekend. If I find it, I will post the patent#. Andrew