Intel Corp (INTC)

[DewDiligence]

[OT] Business 2.0 article on Corning’s non-telecom businesses:

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,46301,00.html

This is the part I thought might be of interest to the semiconductor gurus on this thread:

>> To etch designs onto the silicon wafers that become memory chips or microprocessors, chipmakers use a machine called a stepper. Inside are lenses and mirrors that help guide the laser beams burning the design onto the silicon. Corning has long made fused silica, the same purified glass used in the Hubble telescope, for those mirrors and lenses. But now that chipmakers are squeezing ever-smaller circuits onto their chips, the next generation of steppers will require an even purer kind of glass. Corning expects to supply it by adapting a technique that its researchers have been working on for five years, which involves growing a perfectly clear crystal of the mineral calcium fluoride. Corning anticipates that as the semiconductor industry emerges from its latest cyclical rut, [calcium fluoride]sales will climb 20 percent annually between now and 2008.<<