Wow! No transistors without Susan Felch? Wow!
HERMLE: You know Ms. Felch?
AURELIO: Yes, I know Ms. Felch. Dr. Felch.
HERMLE: And do you work with her?
AURELIO: Yes.
HERMLE: And under what circumstances do you work with her?
AURELIO: I work with Dr. Felch in two ways. She heads our West Coast research facility and is working in partnerships with other companies that do related development. She also is one of the strategists that we have in the company for evolution of technology. And to put together marketing strategies that take customer designs, future design potential, for instance, Intel or Samsung or Micron, and converts that into a product direction that we should pursue.
HERMLE: How long have you known Susan Felch?
AURELIO: I believe about ten years.
HERMLE: And in what ways do you interact with her, your duties and her duties?
AURELIO: Well, as I said, she's in charge of the research facility here. So if we have a meeting where we're talking about long-term strategy, Sue would come to that meeting, a board meeting, for instance, and make a presentation on that aspect of technology and customer interaction. If it's involving the customer and the specific use of this technology with the customer, it's also possible that she and I and others would be sitting with the executives and researchers at this particular company to talk about the technology.
HERMLE: Are you familiar with her particular area of expertise?
AURELIO: Yes. Dr. Felch is one of the world's experts in advanced processing of -- I'm trying to simplify this. Pardon me. She's one of the world's experts on advanced transistor manufacturing. Let me explain it a little bit. Everyone knows Moore's Law.
HERMLE: I'm sorry?
AURELIO: There's a law called Moore's Law.
HERMLE: If I can stop you -- I don't know what Moore's Law is. I have a feeling others in the courtroom may not. If you can tell us.
AURELIO: Dr. Moore, one of the founders of Intel and ex Varian board member, by the way, had a law named after him. You know, the ultimate honor. And Moore's Law said that each year twice as many transistors, basically, will be produced than before. And actually, every eighteen months. And in order to do that, these transistors have to become incredibly small, beyond the limits of comparison to a human hair. And there are tens of millions of transistors on chips. There is over a billion transistors on -- we manufacture these things on what's called a wafer, and a waiver currently is eight inches. Now, what is Dr. Felch's area of expertise? As these transistors become molecularly small, the ability to make them becomes extraordinarily difficult. And there's this thing called a National -- in fact, now it's the International Technology Roadmap -- and the International Technology Roadmap says that we can't produce anymore transistors with current technology in about five to ten years. Can't be done. And so, semiconductor manufacturing as we know it today would stop if we can't figure out how to continue to make these transistors smaller. Now, her particular area of expertise happens to come to how do we hold the ion, which is what we have -- and an ion is like an atom -- how do we keep it precisely in the crystal lattice (phonetic) structure when we put it there with these ion implanters. And through work she's done with Stanford and through collaborative work with others in the Valley, she and they think they have a way to solve this problem. And her basic job and her expertise is to continue to pursue that technology.
HERMLE: Is that work that she does important to the company?
AURELIO: It's important to the United States. So, yeah, it's important to us.
HERMLE: Why do you say that?
AURELIO: Because we don't have transistors with out it.
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