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

To: jeffbas who wrote (1019)	5/28/1998 9:56:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1305

The V2000 is a vector scan tool. It "draws" the features on the mask. The ETEC tools are raster scan. They scan the entire substrate, and flip on and off as needed to create the features. UTEK claims that vector scan is better for complex masks because it's faster and the data volume is smaller. ETEC claims otherwise. At least part of UTEK's interest in mask making is probably due to the need to have a reliable supply of 1X masks to support their exposure tools. 1X masks have inherently higher data densities than 4X masks, so any advantages of vector scanning should be especially noticeable. Katherine PS Yes, Ian, Art really does have 6 Ferraris. He's legendary in Silicon Valley.

To: jeffbas who wrote (1019)	5/28/1998 10:18:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1305

Jeff, Yes, I have 2 reasons to believe that the V2000 may offer advantages in specific circumstances. 1. Art said so. 2. Some of Art's engineers issued a paper with stats that said so. RE 1. Saw a videoclip on the net from the AEA investor's conference in which Art gave out some extremely impressive Performance stats. These were discussed by myself and others on both the UTEK and ETEC threads about 6-7 months ago. Re 2. UTEK IR sent me a copy of the paper entitled "Evaluation of a Next-Generation Vector Electron Beam Mask Pattern Lithography System". Paper was presented to BACUS 1997(#3236-61) and is probably in the public domain. An extract from section 3.0 of the paper is relevant to the spec problem ETEC ran into. ... The V2000 incorporates a new writing strategy referred to as the "soft boundaries" writing strategy, shown in Figure 4. ... With the soft boundaries writing strategy in the new format, the absence of rigid cell boundaries means that figures do not have to be cut on cell boundaries and stripe boundaries as was previously necessary. The elimination of butting errors in critical dimensions results in improved CD uniformity performance. ... [bold print added by me.] Ironically, ETEC emphasized, in their conference call, how important "butting errors" would be to resulting yields. I've never seen UTEK say anything that hypes (perhaps "proclaims" may be a better verb) their "butting" advantage. RE ETEC valuation issue: ETEC owns the market, or at least more than 75% of it and probably close to 100% at the very high end. The overall mask equipment market is expected to grow more rapidly than the sector. ETEC could lose 25% of the market share to UTEK and still have sector beating growth. I mean, their guidance was for only 20% growth. Yeahhh, sure. Nothing like setting the bar low. I have no idea how the market will perceive the fortunes / valuations of either company short term. Ian.