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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (5751)	6/9/1998 2:19:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Just to clarify one point re: copper production. Last year, IBM and Motorola both announced they'd made circuits with copper wiring within a few weeks of each other. At that time, neither company claimed to be shipping copper chips to customers. IBM now does make that claim, but Motorola, to my knowledge, does not. Motorola is very close, though, which makes the whole debate at least partly a battle of PR machines, not technology. Katherine

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (5751)	6/9/1998 7:46:00 AM
From: SemiBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

<<Correct. It's much simpler to get a chipmaker to take a tool on evaluation than it is to get them to actually risk product in it.>> I believe their tool is beyond evaluation. <I saw the Motorola announcement after I sent my earlier note. Still, until someone saws a commercial Motorola (or IBM, or AMD) chip in half and sees copper wiring, none of this is definite. Motorola claims to have a copper CMOS process in 4Q98. IBM claims to have one for foundry customers in 3Q98, and claims to have copper production of its own chips now. Meanwhile, in one of the worst years for equipment sales in the last decade, no one is crowing about copper production buys, even by "major semiconductor manufacturers." Very curious...>> All I can say is Cu production is ramping up generally, and it is seriously being evaluated for SRAM and DRAM. <<>>I guess the theory behind this, and please correct me if I'm wrong or this sounds illogical but as it was proposed to me is the that one supplier supplies the barrier layer tool, and the other supplies the seed layer tool. Close, but not quite. SMTL is a fill layer supplier. NVLS was a barrier and seed layer supplier, and this most recent announcement adds a fill tool to the repertoire.>> I never stated who made which tool. Further, it is still my understanding that at least semis pushing Cu is using two this tool supplier approach, regardless of the NVLS announcement. <<I'm not quite sure I understand the Japanese thinking either, but I can make some guesses. The switch to copper is a radical change requiring substantial retooling. Remember that copper is poison to transistors, and electroplating is inherently messy. No one makes such a change lightly. I suspect the Japanese DRAM companies, already reeling under the price crunch, are reluctant to take that kind of risk unless performance clearly justifies it. They appear to believe that, for DRAMs, the performance advantages are insufficient, and the cost advantages don't balance the development cost, at least for the short term.>> IMHO, I would extremely shocked if they wasted their precious resources given their current economic circumstances on aluminum damascene when several big Japanese semis have acknowledged the importance of Cu. It would seem more logical for them to forego damascene altogether and wait till they found it more financially viable. Just one man's spin....SemiBull

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (5751)	6/9/1998 9:09:00 AM
From: Tony D.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Katherine - Thanks for the excellent information. I am somewhat new to the semi-equip manufacturers. If one wanted to find a reasonsable play on CU technology would NVLS be a good choice. I've been toying between AMAT and NVLS and finally started averaging into NVLS. It sounds like there are other players in the CU arena but NVLS seeemed the strongest (finacially). I would appreciate your comments. Thanks, Tony D.