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Technology Stocks : Dupont Photomasks (DPMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JMD who wrote (345)	3/11/1998 3:28:00 PM
From: Larry Brew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 955

JMD, << insulating films >> As you may know, zirconium, has been widely used in jewelery as a diamond look-alike. It has good qualities as an insulator and is also very hard. Titanium, also a very hard matal, probably has equally good properties when oxidized to become an insulator. Silicon dioxide, very compatiable to chips on silicon wafers, has a very disappointing dialectric coeffecient. I suspect the article disclosed revolves around building better capacitors, the key component in translating analog information into digital codes. The dielectric coeffecient is directly relative to the size of a capacitor. Literally thousands are used on analog to digital chips. Often we used deposited nitride, about 2.5 times better than silicon dioxide, but creates more processing steps due to the nature in some etching steps. (the removal of unwanted material after exposing the wafer at photo-lithogophry.-- DPMI ring a bell here?) The article says it will be 7 times better suggesting to me that somewhere near 1/7 of the area on a chip will be needed to build a capacitor compared to silicon dioxide. Capacitors can take up 50% of a chips area depending on the chip function. Especially when flash conversions are made, a key factor in moving modems from 28k to 56k in speed. Chip size was a tradeoff, increasing processing cost. As chip size goes down, chips per wafer go up, significantly reducing the cost of the chip. Given the same yield ( good chips vs possible good chips) an increase of 50% in chip count reduces the cost of the chip by 50%. It cost the same to process an entire wafer regardless of chip count, all other factors remaining constant. Hope this helps. Now if the innovation is about interlevel insulation, this is another entire discussion, but I suspect it's both. Better interlevel isolation is critical to reducing unwanted parasitics, very critical with the reduction of actual transistor size. In short, the circuits can run faster. Larry ps -- numerous mispellings. Deal with them. Back to stocks.

To: JMD who wrote (345)	3/13/1998 10:31:00 PM
From: Duane L. Olson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 955

Mike, you always find some far out, but pertinent info.. Good post on that LU research. If there is any rapid movement to the smaller features, would you expect something out of this research to offer us the next great bet?.. In specialized chips, the one company I really like now is VTSS. Wonder what the next technological frontiers will offer.... Did you see that article on DPMI taking over the inhouse photomask equipment and operations from one of the Korean semi manufacturers?.. The capital shortage we have been discussing about the Koreans appears to be coming to pass... Hyundai apparently was trying to both raise a little cash AND to get out from the future R&D expense necessary to stay current.. Wonder if recent MU weakness is related....just musing.. TSO