International EUV Symposium: CaFl is still more expensive than gold

Photos of Apple Mac smartphones?

Intel to reduce Pentium4 and Pentium4-M price difference to 15%

Microprocessor Forum 2002: details about VIA Nehemiah and offspring

APAC IDF Fall 2002: Intel announces Manitoba

ABIT announces SI-1N/SI-1Na server mobos

International EUV Symposium: CaFl is still more expensive than gold

• To achieve commercial viability, EUV (extreme ultraviolet) scanners must reach throughput levels of about 120 wafers per hour. The current prototypes provide up to 90 wafers per hour throughput, or 60 wafers per hour, considering servicing.
• Industry´s desired per-scanner target cost is $20 million. Some experts predict EUV scanners to cost $50 million or more.
• For commercial EUV scanners to be ready for production at the 45-nm process technology node, which moves into commercial production in 2007, Intel and other companies need beta EUV tools by 2005.
• Optimism about the long-term potential of EUV lithography, which uses 13.5 nm wavelength light is balanced by fears that the solution may exceed the budgets of all but a few manufacturers of microprocessors and memories.
• At the 45-nm node a logic chip might require four mask levels of EUV lithography for critical layers, another 11 mask layers supplied by 193-nm lithography, and the rest with 248-nm tools.
• Intel´s primary goal is to make EUV work for critical dimensions at the 45-nm node. The default is to make 157-nm work, or to make 193-nm lithography work by using more reticle enhancement techniques.
• For the 32-nm node expected in 2009, EUV scanners and masks will be needed for nine layers. The issue for 157-nm lithography is purely a calcium fluoride issue: high-quality calcium fluoride is more expensive than gold. For the 193-nm scanner lenses now coming to the market, about 10 percent of the lens material comes from calcium fluoride. For the 157-nm scanners, all of the lenses are made from the CaFl material.
• To get high-throughput EUV systems, the laser source must be improved to generate more of the extreme ultraviolet radiation, or light. Today´s best YAG lasers generate only about 10 Watts of radiation, that must be boosted to 100 Watts or more for high-throughput commercial production.
• The sensitivity of the resist must be improved. The desired target is 2 milliJoules of sensitivity for commercial EUV resists.
• Currently ASML is the only EUV beta tools vendor. However, Japanese Canon and Nikon promise to ship their prototypes by 2005.

Source: EE Times

Photos of Apple Mac smartphones?

I guess it would be bad, if that´s a fake. Such stylish devices are quite worthy of bearing the famous brand.

Intel to reduce Pentium4 and Pentium4-M price difference to 15%

It´s not a secret that today´s price difference between ò4 and ò4-í resulted in the appearance of desktop CPU notebooks. The new Intel pricing is to sell P4-M stocks to prepare for the new Banias mobile platform. The new pricing is still unavailable.

Source: The DigiTimes

Microprocessor Forum 2002: details about VIA Nehemiah and offspring

They´ve actually provided technological details about Nehemiah (C5XL) processor core, which 1GHz samples are expected later this year. In 2003 VIA plans to raise chip clock to 1.4-1.5 GHz. At Microprocessor Forum the company demonstrated a working platform on VIA CLE266 and 1.13 GHz C5XL processor.

Details about further processor line development were provided as well. Now in the end of 2003 / beginning of 2004 the company plans to release C5Z core, a higher performance version of C5X, featuring about 2GHz clocks, 22-stage pipeline, SSE2 support, 80 sq.mm crystal, 0.13-micron process. For the low-end market the company plans to release low-power C5XP core and also C5Y with a new high-performance bus. Integrated C5XL and C5Z are planned to 2004, and further plans indicate a mysterious CN chip (perhaps, "N" is a place for another digit) with a completely new architecture.

The new Nehemiah (C5XL) core is not something ultranew, featuring architecture already known by C3 (C5N and Ezra-T). Still the core has changed significantly: 17 pipeline stages instead of 12, SSE support, x87 floating point block, operating at full clock. In other wors, the same architecture, but honed and shaped up.

According to company representatives, C5XL core will contain 32% more transistors then the current C5N, however, the crystal size is reduced from 56 to 52 sq.mm. VIA plans to leave the cost price at the same level, if not to reduce it as well.

APAC IDF Fall 2002: Intel announces Manitoba

Commercialization is expected next year. Supposedly, Manitoba will debut in new 2.5G GSM/GPRS phones.

According to the company, Manitoba processors are currently made using 0.13-micron process, however already in 2003 the production will be moved to 0.09-micron process.

On the photo: Ron Smith, senior vice president and general manager of Intel´s wireless computing and communications group, holding an 8-inch wafer of Manitoba chips.

Source: The DigiTimes

ABIT announces SI-1N/SI-1Na server mobos

SI-1N features Micro ATX design and has 2 DIMM sockets (up to 2GB low-profile non-ECC un-buffered DDR200/266), one 32-bit 33 MHz PCI slot, 4-channel Ultra DMA/ATA133 RAID (HighPoint HPT374, RAID 0,1,0+1), Gigabit LAN (Broadcom BCM5702), 2 USB ports.

SI-1Na differs by two 10/100Base-T LAN (2xIntel 82550EY) instead of Gigabit LAN and doesn´t have IDE RAID.

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