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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro vs Intel (AMD / INTC)
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From: Reseller Mike9/21/2007 12:12:25 PM
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I was offered the opportunity to tour the College of Nanoscale
Science an Engineering (CNSE) at Albany yesterday. What a
place for research. They are adding (I think) the fourth phase
now and will have over 100,000 sq ft of clean room space. The
tour took me through the viewing gallery and I got to see the
new ASML EUV lithography system that is supposed to go live
next week stating at 22nm. This machine is Alpha (one
of a kind) and cost about $65M. The tour guide said they had
to install a new crane just to be able to install the machine.
About half of the cost is the lens (they said about $30-35M).
The machine is surrounded by vacuum pumps as they will be
doing the litho in near total vacuum.

A lot of the equipment is state of the art and either Alpha
or Beta from the manufacturers. They get to work out the issues
and 'customers' (researchers for the fabs) get to try them out
on recipes and process steps.

They are paranoid about security due to the proprietary work
going on. They have one of the main clean rooms divided by
4 glass walls to separate the researchers to help with
security. All of the foubs are coded and you can't discern
what the product is or who the researcher is without the
tracking database. They said every step is fully audited.
ASML and its partners are in one area.

From what I was told, they have invested about $4.2B so far and
there are about 150 companies involved in the research. IBM
seems to be the largest. There were a lot of 300mm wafers in
various stages of processing for the researchers. I counted no
less than 25 foubs at most stations and many more on racks in
queues. They are hiring about 70 new people. From what I
could see they operate 24/7 with two 12.5 hour shifts a day.

I was fascinated by all of the equipment, SEM's everywhere,
CVD, CMP, litho, ion implanters, etc. They were the first
university with 300mm capability and are now the largest
in the world. They employ about 1800 now and are ramping to
2500 by 2009. I would not be surprised if some of the people
getting hired are getting their feet wet for possible jobs at
AMD Luther should it follow through.

Nice way to spend part of the day.

Regards.
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