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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Levine who wrote (34694)	4/3/2000 6:53:00 PM
From: Fred Levine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Can anyone comment on the implications to AMAT of the enclosed NY Times article? It seems to me that this may indicate another generation of fabs, and therefore be quite positive, but I know nothing about technical stuff. April 3, 2000 IBM to Show a Breakthrough in Chip Making By JOHN MARKOFF AN FRANCISCO -- IBM plans to announce on Monday that it has refined a new manufacturing process for producing semiconductor chips and increasing their performance by as much as 30 percent. The new technology, which IBM said would be used in large-volume chip production by the second half of next year, will become increasingly important as the semiconductor industry builds each new generation of more powerful chips, squeezing transistors and wires together so they are separated by only thousands or even hundreds of atoms. The advance involves a new insulating material used to isolate the copper wires that make up the circuitry of an integrated circuit. The development has impressed industry analysts who have seen it and who say that the technology could give IBM a meaningful advantage. "This is a pretty big deal," said G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research, a semiconductor industry market research firm in San Jose, Calif. "Everyone else who has tried to make this work has fallen on their face." When the technique is integrated with two other IBM chip technologies -- copper-wire circuits and another kind of insulating technology known as silicon-on-insulator -- IBM says the company will have entirely transformed its manufacturing process in a way that will be crucial for building at least the next two generations of silicon technology. "This is the final piece of the materials puzzle," said Bijan Davari, vice president for research and development at the company's microelectronics division in East Fishkill, N.Y. At the heart of IBM's new manufacturing process is an insulating material that has been available for several years from the Dow Chemical Corp. Named SiLK, the material is known as a "low-k dielectric" -- a plasticlike material with better insulating properties than the glasslike materials that are used in many of today's semiconductor manufacturing steps. (The "k" refers to the mathematical symbol that electrical engineers use for capacitances, which govern the speed at which data can flow through a circuit. A lower value means that information can flow more quickly, because there is less interference from adjacent wires.) Last year, researchers at Motorola reported that they had successfully integrated a low-k dielectric material with copper wires. But the company said that it did not expect the technology to be in commercial products until 2002. The chip industry's adoption of the new material has been slow because of various properties that make SiLK material maddeningly difficult to work with. "This is a Dow material, but the important part of the announcement is how we have learned how to use it," Davari said. "This material is very soft and if you push on it, it squishes and breaks apart, which makes patterning and polishing challenging." The SiLK material is deposited on the surface of a semiconductor wafer in layers, using a process called "spin on," which evenly distributes it over the surface. The material is then baked in an oven to cause it to harden and act as an insulator to separate the ultrathin copper wires that interconnect different components on the chip. The trick has been in finding ways to polish and pattern the material to ultraprecise specifications. IBM executives said the secret of the process was the patented method by which the computer maker has managed to perfect each layer of the material. They added that IBM had significant intellectual property protection around the process steps it had perfected. The new insulating material has two principal benefits in terms of the performance of integrated circuits. First, it significantly decreases "cross talk" between densely clustered wires. This makes it possible for chip designers to squeeze the wires ever closer together, making it possible to pack more components on each chip. Second, the new material makes it possible for transistors connected by the wires to switch on and off more quickly, increasing the speed of the chip. "It's a little like a runner going at a certain pace while carrying a heavy load," Davari said. "This has the effect of lightening the load on the runner." IBM said that it would apply the new manufacturing process to a wide variety of its chips. These will include microprocessors like the PowerPC chip used by Apple Computer. "The PowerPC will scream," Hutcheson, the analyst, said. "You will have really fast Macintosh computers." fred