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Technology Stocks : Cymer (CYMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Curlton Latts who wrote (20693)	1/22/1999 5:51:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 25960

Sematech revises its next-generation litho forecast -- optical has longer life than expected (again) -- go CYMI! eetimes.com Sematech revises next-generation lithography plans By David Lammers EE Times (01/22/99, 4:35 p.m. EDT) AUSTIN, Texas — The development of a next-generation lithography (NGL) solution, and the effect on NGL of the accelerated International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, will be on the agenda when International Sematech's executive steering committee meets next Tuesday (Jan. 26) for a two-day conference. Several factors have led to reformulation of the NGL question over the past year. Several U.S.-based semiconductor companies now say they will move to sub-tenth-micron geometries as much as two years earlier than had been envisioned in 1997. Further, optical lithography — including the use of fluorine lasers with 157-nm wavelengths — is now believed to be extensible all the way down to the 90-nanometer (0.09-micron) technology generation. The longer life of optical lithography has made the NGL quest a different proposition. At the December NGL Workshop, in Broadmoor, Colo., participants voted for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography as the leading NGL candidate. The Scalpel scanning e-beam system garnered the second-highest number of votes. EUV technology is seen as extensible from the 65-nm node for several generations. The NGL workshop participants appeared to accept the argument that EUV technology, based on 13-nm ultraviolet light, could be extended more easily than alternatives that use charged particles. Those include focused ion beam and Scalpel. "EUV showed very good extendability" at the NGL Workshop, said vice president John Shamaly at the Silicon Valley Group Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which is developing an EUV system. "People now assume that 157-nm systems will be used for the 90-nm node. EUV is targeted at the 65-nm node and is much more extendable than Scalpel or focused ion beam." The workshop participants effectively voted not to endorse the end of X-ray or focused-ion-beam programs at IBM and Siemens, respectively, but to have Sematech concentrate its resources on EUV and Scalpel research. The development work is being done at the EUV LLC in Livermore, Calif., and at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., but more than 100 International Sematech researchers are working on difficult mask and technology-integration issues. The two-day meeting here will bring together top executives from among the 13 member companies of International Sematech. The research consortium this year plans to spend $41 million to $45 million — about a third of its total budget — on lithography-related work. Much of the total will be spent in the mask and resist areas. "The purpose of the meeting is to decide where Sematech will put its money," said Gerhard Gross, director of lithography at Sematech. The meeting comes shortly after the SIA-affiliated international semiconductor technology road-map (ISTR) committee formally decided to pull in the road map's goals by about a year. Paolo Gargini, an Intel Corp. executive who chairs the road-map committee, also is the chairman of the executive steering committee at International Sematech. Gargini told Semiconductor Business News (SBN) that 0.10-micron technology's has been moved up from 2003. According to the revised road map, he said, the "100-nanometer node" will see introduction in 2002. Gross said the expected transitions from 0.10 to 0.07 micron and then to 0.05 micron may also be revised. The target for 70-nm design rules had been 2006; now, 65-nm design rules for processors are expected in 2005. The 0.05-micron generation now may debut in 2008. Gargini told SBN the three-year technology may be revised to two-year cycles. One source at a Japan-based research consortium said Japan's largest semiconductor companies have argued against that acceleration, partly because lithography and mask solutions will not mature as fast as U.S.-based companies think. Some lithography companies are struggling to perfect scanning systems based on 248-nm light sources.