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Technology Stocks : Cymer (CYMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Douglas who wrote (25694)	3/13/2002 9:17:54 PM
From: Pink Minion	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25960

I have heard a second person mention that this was a competition killer but don't know their credentials. Don't they have something like 80% market share? Not much competition to kill.

To: Robert Douglas who wrote (25694)	3/18/2002 4:11:53 PM
From: Robin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25960

Robert, To divulge my credentials, I'm a former Cymer employee, having worked in engineering for about five years up until the May01 RIF. I will identify for you what I can without violating my prior confidentiality agreements. As one here pointed out, the Raptor technology does not do much for improving earnings overall, but does give Cymer a deathgrip on market share for at least the next five years. The Raptor design improves Cymer's posturing on two fronts. First, Cymer's laser and that of each of the competitor's consume a significant amount of energy to produce the desired output. This creates two problems as far as facility requirements are concerned. First is the matter of providing power to the units. Several of Cymer's customers utilize 220V power to the units and consume about 80-90 amps in the 4KHz version (to my best recollection). The second is the matter of waste energy. A significant amount of cooling liquid is required to dissipate the 99% + waste energy created. Assuming Cymer or her competitors continue to higher power levels with their existing designs, facilities requirements (cooling water and electrical service) will increase similarly and will reach impractical levels. The new Raptor design allows dramatic improvements in electrical efficiency, possibly to the point where the laser can be powered by standard electrical wiring (220V, 15A or less, sorry but I did not remain at Cymer long enough to have knowledge of what the eventual efficiency levels came in at) and also allow the laser to use air cooling at best or an accessory chiller at worst. You can see where this simplifies the life of the facility designer and also reduces cost of operation. The second advantage would be that of design tradeoffs. The present design has always been limited by design tradeoffs; bandwidth came at the expense of output power, output power at the expense of component lifetime, etc. With the Raptor design, the 'first' optical chamber can be optimized for bandwidth improvements and power output is no longer a concern to be considered in this portion of the design. I would imagine that this portion of the laser can be designed with unlimited lifetime (>5 yr). The second chamber will be nothing more than an optical pump or amplifier. Components can be selected to withstand the higher energy levels and power efficiency is dramatically enhanced as the molecular pairs (the excited dymers) are kept at the higher energy state until the desired release of energy. The majority of dymers no longer are excited with each pulse followed and then dropped back to a lower state, but rather are excited and held at that energy level until used. Waste heat is dramatically reduced and power efficiency increased in like amounts. Extrapolating further, one would assume that the first chamber could be driven at much higher frequencies (the charge time of the Commutator or 'capacitor bank' was the frequency limiting factor previously). Energy levels with each pulse could then be lowered and the lifetime of optics (lenses) could be greatly extended both within the laser and the scanner. This has been a problem since 1KHz days as the instantaneous power levels caused compaction of the lattice structure of the lenses. And while I don't have knowledge of this, I would bet that Cymer has applied a very broad patent to cover this type of laser design (two chamber, precision laser with pump) for this application (photolithography). An absolute barrier to competition if they have. This would be a good question for the analysts to ask at the next conference call and if not, I will be asking it at the next shareholder's meeting. Just a brief overview, but hopefully enough to enlighten everyone of the significance of this technology advance, one I believe is the most significant in the last several years of Cymer's history. Robin!