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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (25686)	10/23/1998 2:24:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Katherine, Wouldn't merging KLAC's capabilities with FrontEnd companies such as NVLS and LRCX facilitate some (potentially) significant innovations re in-tool measurement, inspection and corrective action related to yield improvement and lowered maintenance costs? Just a thought, Ian.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (25686)	10/23/1998 5:05:00 PM
From: Math Junkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

<<I had not heard the KLAC in front-end rumors. Their independence of any particular tool platform seems to me to be one of their biggest advantages, for whatever that's worth.>> For one thing, keeping the inspection tools separate makes it a lot easier to keep those high-falutin' optics clean! When you consider how engineering-intensive the business is, it's hard to see why anyone would want to run the engineering costs up by designing a different version of each inspection tool for every step of the fab process.