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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Gahm who wrote (30677)	3/18/1998 12:40:00 PM
From: Zoran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

Beware of abuses in presenting technology critical dimensions for marketing purposes. According to the SIA 0.25um technology has photoresist linewidth of 0.25 um, after etching the gate length is only 0.2 um, with the effective channel length of 0.17 um. Companies that don't have money for the state-of-the-art fabs sometimes claim that they have 0.25 um technology, which can mean that there effective channel length is 0.25 um while in reality that is 0.35 um technology at the best. For 0.35 um technology one can use i-line steppers that are much cheaper than DUV ones. MU got the first DUV stepper from ASMLF, how good it is who knows (I wouldn't bet Simplot's potato field on it). With aggressive design rules one can make a die much smaller but by doing this the number of critical masking steps is increasing, which means more expensive lithography tools (5-6 M$ for a DUV stepper/scanner, >10M$ for the 193nm one). The point I want to make is that the transition to smaller dice will demand a lot of capital. Zoran