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

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (65926)	9/16/2002 7:59:22 PM
From: SemiBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Bringing us back to the point of this thread.... Applied enters standalone RTP equipment market By Mark Lapedus, Semiconductor Business News Sep 16, 2002 (4:32 AM) URL: siliconstrategies.com SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Taking a new approach in a critical chip-production market, Applied Materials Inc. here today entered the standalone rapid thermal processing (RTP) equipment arena, by rolling out a new tool for 300-mm wafer fabs. The Radiance Vantage is a dedicated, two-chamber RTP tool for use in developing advanced transistors in 130-, 90-, and 65-nm chip designs, said Ben Bierman, managing director of the thermal systems and modules division in Applied's transistor and capacitor group. The Vantage tool supports the critical annealing, oxidation and related steps in high-volume, 300-mm chip production, Bierman said. "I expect [the Vantage] will be our workhorse RTP system until 2006," he said in an interview with SBN. With the Vantage tool, Applied hopes to extend its lead in RTP. It claims to be the leader in this arena, with 84% market share in 2001. In total, RTP was a $367 million equipment market last year, according to Santa Clara-based Applied. While Applied is the king of the hill in RTP, the Santa Clara-based equipment giant is taking a new approach in this market. It is offering a dedicated, standalone RTP platform, an approach that has already been endorsed by several vendors in the marketplace, it was noted. Until now, Applied offered an RTP chamber within its Centura line of fab tools. The Centura is a 200/300-mm, multi-chamber system that supports chemical vapor deposition, RTP and other technologies for production fabs. Essentially, Applied took the so-called Radiance RTP chamber from the Centura and bolted it to a new, dedicated mainframe, dubbed the Vantage. Applied will continue to offer the RPT chamber in the Centura, but noted that the dedicated Vantage tool has several advantages over the cluster-tool approach in IC production. The Vantage has 45% fewer components than the Centura, which lowers overall system costs and boosts the reliability for RTP, Bierman said. "The Vantage is half the size of the Centura," he said. "It also has a 5%-to-10% greater throughput than the Centura," he said. Bierman denied that Applied is moving away from its previously- announced initiative to push modular or cluster tools as the mainstay technology for IC production environments. "Clustering has some advantages. There are some advantages for gate stacking applications," he said. "But for most annealing steps, our customers would choose a dedicated tool for production." The Radiance Vantage supports all annealing applications in 300-mm production fabs, such as implant annealing, spike annealing and salicidation. It also supports dry rapid thermal oxidation. Target salicidation markets include the deposition of cobalt, nickel and titanium. RTP supports all annealing applications, he said. RTP is also replacing furnaces for many oxidation applications. The tool supports a temperature process range from 300 degrees Celcius to 1200 degrees Celsius. The tool has a ramp-up temperate rate of 250 degrees Celsius per second and a cool down rate of 90 degrees Celsius per second. The tool is configured with up to two RTP process chambers, which are linked to a factory interface and track robot. A simplified wafer transfer sequencing system enables the tool to have an overall throughput of more than 100 wafers per hour. Applied has begun shipping the tool to undisclosed customers for DRAM, logic, and other chip applications.

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (65926)	9/16/2002 8:26:35 PM
From: Fred Levine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

OT OT Harmad-- >>I'm curious as to whether you also think Israel must be forced to obey the Security Council resolutions demanding it withdraw from lands it occupied in its 1967 war ?<< Wonderful question and I wished you hadn't asked it (VBG). If you remember, Israel offered to return to the pre '67 borders in exchange for peace. The Arabs refused. Abba Ebin, in one of my favorite quotes, stated that "This war is the only one is history in which the victors sued for peace and the vanquished sued for surrender." In return for peace, everyone would be better off with withdrawal and peace. In fact, because of Arab intransigence and by being drunk with easy military victory, Israel became transformed from a somewhat utopian idealistic state into a somewhat militaristic state. Therefore, the settlements in Arab territory which is like placing a thorn in the side of the Palestinians. Having said that, I also feel that force is often necessary when vital national interests are threatened, and I am glad that Israel, in full violation of international law, bombed the nuclear facilities of Iraq. In addition, I feel that Arab oil and the internal politics of many European states with growing Arab populations, makes many UN actions political rather than correct. As a counterbalance, the Jewish lobby keeps the US on Israel's side. What seems to be happening now, is that both sides are seeing the futility of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Things seem to be improving. fred