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

To: BJFW MD who wrote (14423)	2/8/1998 5:18:00 PM
From: FJB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

RE:YAG lasers for 193nm. Cymer has looked at this. They don't think it's the way to go. BTW, a circa 1995 ArF laser from Cymer operating at 350Hz put out 6W of power on average. Here were Akins' comments on this topic in a previous call: Ushio is a different kind of competitor. You know they all, that they manufacture the mercury bulb used in steppers. Ushio has had a press release recently discussing their work on a solid-state alternative light source technology - alternative to excimer laser light source technology. This is not a new alternative. It was proposed oh, maybe seven years ago or so by, principally by Sony. Sony developed this technology. It's a YAG laser, frequency-multiplied to the Deep-UV area. There are significant limitations to average power in these machines. There are significant problems with spatial coherence which provides [here a word that sounds like 'speclum'] noise in the wafer. You have to gang these lasers together to produce the types of average power required. I ask anyone interested to check into the literature - which has been in place for years now - about the real competitiveness issue and cost of ownership associated with these lasers. We actually hired a graduate student from UC Berkeley about five years ago who did his thesis on comparing solid-state laser alternatives to excimer lasers for Deep-UV lithography. He worked in [here a word that sounds like Dote] Oldham's group, and we stay very abreast of these technologies, and at this point in time as in the [unintelligible] past five to seven years we feel that excimer lasers are the best solution to this problem.