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

To: Pete Young who wrote (10104)	10/31/1997 4:43:00 AM
From: Artslaw	Respond to of 70976

AMAT RTP. I have a friend whose job it is to evaluate different RTP tools for a major semiconductor company. About two years ago, I was talking to him about A.G. Associates [AGAI] (vanguard RTP company). He explained to me in detail why the AMAT tool that his company had adopted was better than the A.G. Heatpulse they had previously used (for the most part, the A.G. tool had worse temperature control due to fewer thermocouples and different lighting system). I wish I had dumped my AGAI at the time, but I ended up riding it down a few points over a year long span. AMAT ended up eating into AGAI's market share and is now the RTP leader after only a couple years. I do not know anything about the newest AMAT RTP tools compared to the newest AGAI Heatpulse (which is reportedly quite good), but at one time, another RTP expert seemed to believe AMAT's tool was quite good. I have also had the opportunity to talk to quite a few technicians at Lucent about the tools they use. Many of the employees there used to work at other major companies (quite a few from Intel and IBM), where they used different tools. The concensus opinion on etch tools has essentially been that each has its good points and each has its bad, and overall no one who had used two or more different etchers said one was considerably better. I was a little dismayed about this (I wanted to hear "We love our Applied tools!"), but that's what I heard. One important point: The technicians often complained that the engineers who ultimately purchase the equipment don't listen to the technicians' input as much as they would like, so the opinions of the operators are perhaps not as important as one would think. Steve