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Technology Stocks : General Lithography -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Volsi Mimir who wrote (781)	2/26/1998 1:17:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance	Respond to of 1305

This is a more impressive article but we got the gist with the original posted by me. Unless there was another source that I overlooked, we got a 1 day jump on the mainstream<GGG> Wednesday February 25, 9:41 pm Eastern Time Major chip advance by Univ. of Texas with DuPont By Therese Poletti SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 25 (Reuters) - A University of Texas graduate student team and DuPont Photomasks Inc. (DPMI - news) have achieved a major breakthrough in semiconductor production design that was not believed possible with current technology. A team of graduate students led by Grant Willson, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering, has produced a semiconductor wafer print etched with the finest transistor line width yet, a feat not expected by the industry until at least 2007-2008 with futuristic techniques now in research. The University of Texas in Austin created a silicon wafer ''print'' with features measuring at 0.08 micron, a way to measure the fine line-width of elements that make up transistors on a semiconductor. One micron is approximately 1/25,000th of an inch; current semiconductors are using .35 or .25 micron technology. But industry executives said the key to the research breakthrough is that the team created the wafer print -- which has no working transistors -- on a slice of silicon using current optical technology instead of using one of many futuristic techniques now being researched that use new light sources such as extreme ultraviolet lithograhy, X-ray lithography and others. ''I didn't believe it could be done at first,'' Willson said in a statement. ''It really works better than my wildest imaginings ...'' He said there appeared to be room to generate even smaller feature. The project was funded by Sematech, an industry reserach consortium of 10 semiconductor companies. The Austin, Texas-based team created these ultra-fine features using a photomask produced by DuPont Photomasks Inc. at their Round Rock, Texas, facility; a photoresist process developed by the University of Texas team; and a piece of chip-making equipment known as a stepper made by a little-known company called ISI. ''It's going to take five to six years to know if this is commercially viable,'' said Ken Rygler, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at DuPont Photomasks. ''There are many hills to climb, but it's an important proof of concept.'' Rygler said it was a plus and surprising that all the technology used in the process is available now. Round Rock-based DuPont Photomasks -- which was spun off from chemical giant Dupont Co. a year and a half ago -- is the world's leading maker of photomasks, the translucent plates containing precision images of a chip's features. Those features are transferred to a silicon wafer by exposing the wafer to ultraviolet light beamed through the mask. The wafer is covered with an oxide insulation layer and then coated with film. When the light beamed through the photomask hits the film, the film hardens. The wafer is then subjected to an acid that etches the insulation below, exposing the silicon. These and other steps are repeated again and again, creating the transistors. As chips become more powerful, more transistors are placed on a single chip. Intel Corp.'s (INTC - news) Pentium II microprocessor, for example, contains 7.5 million transistors. To make chips with even more transistors, the light source has to become thinner and thinner, in order to create finer lines in the masking process. The light now used is invisible to the human eye. ''We are already in the invisible-light wavelengths,'' Intel spokesman Howard High said, referring to the industry's current use of ultraviolet light sources that measure 193 nanometers to develop chips that are about .25 micron. The development by the University of Texas researchers was especially impressive, executives said, because it was achieved with light measured at 193 nanometers, instead of a light stream measured at an even thinner 13 nanometers, used in extreme ultraviolet research. ''It tells us that optics have a lot more life in them than people thought,'' said Dan Hutcheson, president of market research firm VLSLI Research Inc., adding the development was ''pretty phenomenal.'' ''It's pretty hard to paint a two-inch line if its a four-inch paint brush,'' Hutcheson said. But the industry is not likely to cut back any of its research into the post-optic technologies, where many companies are spending millions of dollars in research groups such as a consortium Intel has founded with chip-making rivals Motorola Inc. (MOT - news) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD - news). International Business Machines Corp. (IBM - news) and Lucent Technologies Inc. (LU - news) also each have big research into X-ray lithography. ''I suspect that work will continue,'' DuPont's Rygler said. ''... That's why a $2,000 PC gets more powerful every year.'' Andrew