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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Bill Jackson who wrote (63253)6/24/1999 9:48:00 PM
From: kash johal  Read Replies (1) of 1572208
 
Bill,

What PB has described is an interim step.

When you introduce a new standard part you just design it and fab and then fix everything and just ship the hell out of it.

In CPU's there are continual mask tweaks to get every scrap of performance out of the chip.

In addition folks tweak the transistors to see what additional performance can be tweaked.

An "easy" first step is just to shrink the transistors via CAD to new transistor specs leaving everything else identical.

This reduces a whole bunch of variables and lets you evaluate any transistor performance/yield issues.

Once happy with the transistors you can then fix those and relayout the chip with tighter metal rules and get the much smaller die size ut perhaps with not much speed improvement.

Once that works you start up on the transistors again and optomize them again for increased speed.

In the past AMD has not had the luxury of a proven production process so they have had to throe a new design and a new process together. Clearly with more vaiables a tougher task to master rapidly.

This time AMD has a proven 0.25 process with very fast transistors already. So the K7 has been easier to ramp up (so far).

Now they are rampig that and in parallell have down the relayout to the 0.18 micron chips.

If they do a good job the 0.18 micron parts will not only yield like a bat out of hell but be faster too. On the other hand they could have a surprise like Intel did with its 0.18 parts.

So expect a lot of transitional steps and not a giant leap on the K7 ramp.

Regards,

kash
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