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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (22072)	7/22/1998 10:46:00 PM
From: John L.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Most of the .18um is going to happen with equipment upgrades so the total equipment purchases will not be that big. The larger geometry devices are becoming obsolete, but rather than scrap the equipment in favor of new generation tools most device manufacturers have opted to upgrade existing gear. The next big equipment purchases will probably be to go for copper, if this new device is 600Mhz maybe it will have to use copper. Intel has R&D pilot lines that are doing .18um now with aluminum. What kind of speeds and yields they are getting is unknown to me, but shrinking the line widths is possible with aluminum which won't bring much business to the equipment manufacturers. I hope this will start a new cycle of purchases based on copper technology because 300mm seems to be dead for a while.