To: contax who wrote (5796 ) 10/23/1997 12:54:00 AM From: FJB Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Karim, No need for you to rebut Goto. Cymer and Nikon already have. Here are some relevant statements concerning the issue from part 3 of the transcribed CC. They are not continuous.exchange2000.com We are not aware of that. I mean I want to say something that I mentioned to a few people in private conversations on the telephone on Friday, and that is that although we are in with our customers on a day by day basis, because we also ship product to their competitors, when it comes to the day to day rationale behind their manufacturing flow, whether it's are they getting enough parts, solving technical problems and so forth, they are especially guarded about that because they don't want, obviously all of our customers are extremely concerned that the rest of the world not have intimate knowledge about the trials and tribulations about building Deep-UV steppers. If rumors were to get out as they are now, that are perhaps unfounded about a companies capability to produce units, that could have an impact on their order rate from chip makers and chip market shares, so huge dollars are in the swing here. We don't have that kind of information, so we have no basis with which to confirm or deny your speculation there, Steve. Could you just update us on the progress of your retrofit program and also is that going to enable your customers to basically assemble lasers more quickly? Will that help them at all? Because some of them have had very long assembly times for their steppers.Mr. Shimomura at Nikon said that the lasers or their technical performance is not a limitation on their ability to ramp up steppers. What this impacts is principally cost of I will point out that this is a decision that we have made to take charge of our own destiny and take responsibility for the lasers ourselves. We initiated it and we are doing it on our decision. Nobody invited us to do this and nobody forced us to do it and we are raising this competitiveness bar in our minds by implementing this kind of a program. I was just wondering - and this isn't really your problem - but could you just comment on the report from the brokerage on Friday about Nikon lasers having gas leaks or whatever, and it seemed to be such large quantities that he referenced, I was just wondering, do you have any idea where that came from?But actually I will address this one, because gas leaks, depending on who hears it and who describes it, could be envisioned to be a safety issue. And it's simply wrong. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no gas leaks. I think that the analysts in question are confusing the term gas leak with gas life. And as you're aware, at least one analyst report talked about gas life, another gas leak. Gas life refers to the amount of time the gas can reside in the discharge chamber in the laser before it becomes somewhat contaminated, and must normally be computer pumped out and refilled again. Gas life has a very small impact on the cost of ownership of the tool, and is a very very strong variable of not only the duty cycle of a laser itself, but also the purity of the gas that you buy from your gas supplier and the purity of the gas lines with which it's distributed from the gas bottle to the laser. And that has a tendency to vary from chipmaker to chipmaker. Of course, the lasers have to meet stringent gas life specifications before they ever leave the factory. It becomes progressively more difficult for us to predict what that will be as it gets further and further from our factory over time. But again, there have been no gas leaks to the best this management team's attention, and that should simply be dispelled.
