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

To: Tulvio Durand who wrote (11557)	12/15/1997 3:30:00 PM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 25960

<<Bob, please enlighten us on "critical" vs. "noncritical" dimmensions and layers and the "mix and match" art. I take it that printing the entire wafer with 0.25 nm DUV is uneconomical or unfeasible or both.>> I can answer this question. I just talked to a budy of mine working for a company manufacturing 256MB DRAM 0.25um. The die size is huge, in the order close to 200mm^2. The critical layers are STI (shallow trench isolation), polygate, 1st and 2nd metals, and 1st and 2nd contacts. These critical layers use CYMI excimer laser photolithgraphy. Who is the maker of the steppers? Canon! I can't tell you who that company is but it is a major player in DRAM. Anyway 6 layers is almost 40% of all the lithography steps. This is more critical layers than the microprocessor maker. The 256MB DRAM is very dense and overlay is very critical. These excimer lasers are very economical in production, much more than i-line since it has a higher throughput. The reason that the industry still using mix-match stuff is that they have to utilize the tools they already paid for. It only make sense. Other companies haven't put these excimer steppers in production because they are still evaluating it and need the learning curve. Once they get all the process issues resolved the stepper works like a charm. When it comes down to tool evaluation, performance, price, and needs determine the winner. In short term buying i-line along with .25um steppers is the best model. In longer term like 2-3 years down the road, buying all .25um excimer steppers is the best choice since these tools will be alive and well in the future. Anyone buying CYMI for cheap price today? It is on sale in the 16s. Maxwell PS: My steppers are ASM/300.