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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials

AMAT 294.18

-7.7%

12:03 PM EST

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To: Kumar Nathan who wrote (4520)	5/15/1997 11:39:00 AM
From: Chao	of 70976

Kumar, Sorry, I just had to crawl out of my lurker shell to respond to this. >Paul: Good info. All the IC companies are expecting 300mm and are >forcing fabs to go in for 300mm process. Moreover .5mu process is >almost outdated. Everybody is going towards .35 mu or (if >possible).25mu. If you look at the roadmap of every IC designers >they will have this. In the US, I really only know of Intel going to 300mm. I would believe that many of the larger companies will be going to 300mm in the forseeable future. However, I would not say that all IC companies are expecting to go to 300mm. Take a company like National who have really just gone to a 200mm process. Or Maxim who are starting a 200mm fab. Granted, eventually the 300mm fabs will be the wave of the future, but I think that it's going to take some time to get there. It's just too expensive. Interesting thing that came up once is how one 300mm processed wafer may cost $100,000. So that means one lot can easily exceed $1M. First problem is if a company wants to development on 300mm wafers (which they would have to....200mm development would not work for 300mm production). Development costs would skyrocket. The other problem would be errors. Sure, the yield per wafer would increase. But screw up one wafer, and that's $100K down the tubes. As far as device size goes, I'd have to say the near future would be .25um. .18 um effective gate is likely, but drawn is much more difficult. .35 is already getting behind the times. Whatever the case is, I don't see AMAT slowing down except in spurts for a couple more generations. HC

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