Katherine,
Re: "Though AMD's problems may be more spectacular than most, I can
guarantee that no one is finding sub-0.25 micron production to be easy."
How about IBM? They've been shipping System 390s built with 0.18 micron and copper interconnect since last month. >600 MHz overall machine clock frequency, too. Admittedly, these are low volume compared with Pentium class or DRAM volumes and I have no idea what IBM's yields are with that process. I wouldn't bet against them though. Whose equipment does IBM use, usual suspects, AMAT, etc.? Surprising to me that Intel came up with problems on their 0.18 PIII, named Coppermine. Scuttlebutt is all over the place, from crosstalk, to they should have used CU for speed, to Coppermine's design itself. Paul Engel says the process guys are bailing out the design, or layout guys for a temp fix, or workaround, while they fix the real problem, whatever it is. The process fixes are several, each gaining some speed for the chip. When summed up, the chip hopefully gets to 600 - 650 MHz for November intro.
Tony |
