Andrew, rational to us business man, but very irrational to bean counters. They will look at WFR balance sheet and puke. Apart of that, I am not sure that $100 MM will do. Second, if the 300 mm guys were serious about such an approach, they would have made their investment now. There are about 8 to 10 300mm fabs coming on line in the next 18 months, or about 400,000 wafers required per month. I ave no idea how long the boules are in the 300 mm series, but I doubt they are more than 1000 mm long, or at best each boule can provide about 500 wafers (at least until yields go up and the guys go down their own learning curve). I doubt they can do more than 15 "campaigns" per puller per month, so they will need just for those 10 fabs some 15 pullers (assuming they get 25% of that demand) and associated equipment (saws, polishing QC etc.). I don't know what these pullers go for, but each must go for a cool $5 to $10 MM. Furthermore, if the fabs wanted to assure that supply, they'd better rush and fund WFR now, these things take a long time to build and debug.
On another thread, I warned that the semi cycle might become impeded by the shortages in wafers, it sure looks to me that the 300 mm program is going to suffer, and I am not sure if we are not bouncing against capacity in the 200 mm arena either. What I do not understand is how come the most recent prices are still 40% under the 1996 or so prices. Competition between the wafer suppliers must be fierce or they have lost pricing power.
Zeev |
