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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials
AMAT 259.21-4.0%Dec 12 9:30 AM EST
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To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (22975)8/13/1998 9:48:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire  Read Replies (1) of 70976
 
The 300mm transition is the first in which one of the chip companies hasn't taken a leading role. For instance, IBM funded the lion's share of 200mm development. Since the 300mm transition hasn't actually happened yet, it's too early to say whether pushing the R&D off to the suppliers has worked or not. It's also too early to say how much of the R&D investment the suppliers will eventually be able to recoup.

For future transitions, I think we may see something in between. The big capital equipment suppliers are more able to fund R&D themselves, and generally have healthier profit margins than, for instance, the wafer companies. Also, the scale-up issues are more tractable for wafer-scale processes (like deposition) than for die-scale processes (like lithography). So we might see funding from the chip companies to the weak links (the links that were perceived as bottlenecks in the 300mm transition), while the strong links (like AMAT) are left to fend for themselves.

I was going to say that we might see funding to some companies in exchange for preferential access to the technology, but I don't think that would work in a wafer-size transition. While a better stepper is useful even if everything else in the fab remains unchanged, a lone 300mm tool is pretty useless without the rest of the fab.

Regarding companies going out of business because they can't fund the R&D, I doubt the chipmakers care.

Katherine
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