Intel Investors - Another Insight Into Intel's Wafer Fabrication issues.
And the following comment from Mike Splinter:
"Intel plans to quickly move forward to 300-mm wafer sizes, since that will reduce its cost of wafers back to where it was in the early 1990's, he said. "That's extremely motivating for us." Intel will start its 0.13-micron next generation process on 200-mm wafers, but will quickly move it to 300-mm wafers, he added. "
Paul
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Intel executive criticizes equipment makers' turnaround time
By Robert Ristelhueber, EE Times
Jan 11, 2000 (3:25 PM)
URL: eetimes.com
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. ( ChipWire) -- Semiconductor equipment suppliers must speed up the delivery time and ramp-to-performance of their gear to satisfy the shorter design cycles of their chip customers, a senior Intel Corp. executive said today. "Our technology cycles have shrunk over the last 10 years from three and half years to two years and sometime even less than two years," said Michael Splinter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group. "When the technology gets that fast, there isn't a whole lot of time to wait. We need that mature equipment performance and run rate early in the life cycle of the technology right out of the box. That's a huge expenditure for us today, waiting and working and driving the pieces of equipment to maturity.
Splinter was speaking to executives at the annual Industry Strategy Symposium here.
"Oftentimes, we don't get there before the peak of the technology, and that just results in us buying more pieces of equipment than we would have needed," Splinter said. "It frustrates us, and frustration between customers and suppliers is never good."
Chipmakers need their equipment vendors to respond more quickly, he said. "I don't think we've seen lead time reduction in the equipment industry ever. We see stretching out then shrinking out, but lead times never get on average less than six to nine months. That's too long in this economy, it's too long compared to the life cycles of our technology."
By the time the equipment is installed and running, a full year can pass before wafers start coming out of the end of the pipe, Splinter added. "What can we do together to cut that time? Why can't we be three months on average?" he asked the audience, made up primarily of equipment and materials suppliers.
Price competition in the microprocessor market has forced Intel to pay greater attention to cost. "A few years ago, I think most people would say Intel doesn't worry a whole lot about cost, but certainly I think you've seen a pretty dramatic change in the way we act and the way we negotiate and the overall concern of the resulting cost of our product."
One of those changes has been to use more than one supplier for certain pieces of equipment, he said. To win Intel's business, a supplier will have to make the best balance between technology, speed and cost, Splinter said.
The chip industry will need to better utilize remote diagnostics to service quickly the far-flung wafer fabs, he said. With most of the equipment expertise concentrated in a relatively few heads, the Internet will also need to be used to get that expertise where it's needed, Splinter contended.
Intel plans to quickly move forward to 300-mm wafer sizes, since that will reduce its cost of wafers back to where it was in the early 1990's, he said. "That's extremely motivating for us." Intel will start its 0.13-micron next generation process on 200-mm wafers, but will quickly move it to 300-mm wafers, he added.
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