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To: Mr. Aloha who wrote (16570)	4/15/1998 2:33:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25960

Excerpt from Dr. Moore's LONG report: << So if you look at the quarter micron technology, you see it's about 1.2, 1.3 billion dollars per 5,000 wafers. If you wanted 10,000 wafer factory, you're between two and two and a half billion dollars in capital investment. As we move to the next generation of technology, it moves up a fair amount from .25 to .18 because controlling the smaller dimensions require exactness of state of the art. But at the same time, if we move to 300 millimeter wafers, a very likely thing to happen, we get up to something like $2 billion for 5,000 wafers per week. Or if we still want 10,000 wafer facilities, our plants get up in the $4 billion range. Amazing to me, the industry has been able to swallow these huge increases in capital. We can get considerably more output as we move from one to the other also, so all is not completely wasted, certainly. But it is an increasing challenge as we move up the curve. I mentioned lithography is a challenge. If we want to stay on this road map, continuing with smaller and smaller dimensions, requires a tremendous amount of work because now we're in a range that's below the optical wavelength, and increasingly is below the wavelength of the ultraviolet light we can get as well. We can make laboratory samples of very small features. This shows .15 micron lines with .15 micron spaces in what we used to call a thin film, even though the film is several times as thick as the features we're putting in it. But the tools don't exist to do this over a large area or on a production basis yet. We think they will come along by the time we need them, which is for the generation beyond .18 microns. In fact, if we look at lithography alternatives, we've been able to use ultraviolet light down to the .25 generation in production. By pushing the techniques as hard as we can, actually writing features that are smaller than wavelength, we should be able to push to the .18 microns and moving into production in a couple of years. Below that, life gets a lot more difficult, and that's where we're looking at really the industry, looking at x-rays, some special E-beam writing techniques, each of which is making structures using a very short wavelength but which have a variety of other problems. Or IE investment for extreme ultraviolet which lets you use mirrors, multiple layer dielectric mirrors. {} Maybe we can extend a lot of ideas of optical lithography for a couple more generations. Any one of these three technologies, if it can work potentially has the ability to take us down really about as far as we want to go. >>