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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Process Boy who wrote (88941)1/23/2000 9:50:00 AM
From: Shane Geary  Read Replies (1) of 1572369
 
PB: "and the sizeable cost advantage on .18 over Copper due to immature Cu equipment status."

Why do you say Intel gets a 'sizeable' cost advantage due to immature Cu equipment status?

So the cost advantage is due to the performance of the Cu tools, not the cost of them or of the Cu process per se? Interesting.

Personally, I can see that Intel will gain a cost advantage relative to their OWN costs of introducing a Cu process - because of the amount of equipment re-use possible. It may then make a lot of financial sense for Intel to remain with Al in their current fabs for the 0.18um process. Intel have trumpeted the amount of equipment re-use they have as a significant contributor to cost reduction,

AMD did the same in fab25 for the 0.18um process, remember.

However, when kitting out a NEW fab, the financial implications must be very different. You don't want to introduce equipment that you will then have to get rid of one process generation (2 years) later. It is possible that AMDs Cu tools will be utilised in subsequent generations.

Also, in theory at least, a dual damascene copper process has fewer steps the traditional Al + W dep/etch backend processes, ultimately allowing better defect density (reported by IBM) and lower wafer costs.

I agree with you that much greater MHz benefit from Cu will be seen at 0.13um and below.

But lets not go through this again!!

Regards,

Shane
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