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To: Andrew Vance who wrote (760)	2/6/1998 1:26:00 AM
From: Aaron Zuckerman	Respond to of 1305

Andrew, Hi, my name's Aaron. I'm grateful for your well informed posts. It's useful to hear from a fellow investor who also works in the industry. In your opening statement for the thread you mention that you like UTEK. I understand that they have a mask making tool in development that is supposedly dramatically more efficient than competing technologies. I was wondering if you'd be willing to comment on this technology and whether UTEK spels any serious competition to DPMI and PLAB. I'm not nearly as knowledgable as you are so please pardon me if I appear naive or uninformed. Also, it's not entirely clear to me what UTEK's core products are. They call themselves Ultratech Stepper yet they don't seem to make steppers, at least not the type that compete with ASMLF, Nikon and the like. If you don't mind I'd appreciate any description you can give of UTEK's products and strengths. Thanks, AZ

To: Andrew Vance who wrote (760)	2/6/1998 2:04:00 AM
From: TI2, TechInvestorToo	Respond to of 1305

<The above is really the big rub. Non Memory devices used to be 1-2 process generations behind Memory and CPU device technology. As the life cycles of design rules (critical feature sizes) get more and more compressed, it seems that we are about to reach parity in the industry.> I believe this is occuring for mainstream now. IMHO this parity occurred with the technical performance leaders a few years ago. I also believe that small linewidths (but relaxed specs) is a great way to reduce costs of older chip designs by the reduced cost, die shrink routes (ie 16 MB DRAM @ 250 nm ground rules===lotsa teeny tiny die/wafer, then the market dropped!) for the cost leaders. Thanks again for great posts. TI2