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Technology Stocks : Lam Research (LRCX, NASDAQ): To the Insiders -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: All Mtn Ski who wrote (4986)	4/15/2004 1:54:17 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5867

It is called "breakdown" One reason new technology (smaller geometries) are lower power is because the breakdown voltage of the device is less when they shrink it. Thus, as they shrink size they also shrink voltage. Well, an LCD takes higher voltage and the drivers need to be large to deliver the voltage quickly. Usually driver transistors are orders of magnitude above the design rule minimum on area to do this task. If 95% of your chip is driver transistors, which is logical for an LCD where each pixel might need a transistor.... or at least row/column drivers (I've never designed one so I don't know the fine details) then going smaller than 0.18um buys you nothing and can actually make your device nonfunctional due to breakdown! Hope this helps. BTW. old technologies never really die. I remember we designed a DMOS process to drive motors using an optical isolation amplifier for factory automation. Design trade-off are far different than designing a Pentium for a desktop.