Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT)

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To: Sam Citron who wrote (7452)	10/8/2003 1:10:13 PM
From: Kirk ©	Read Replies (1) of 25522

As the chip industry migrates to China, a relatively low-wage country, it would not be surprising to see some labor substituted for capital, to the extent that is feasible in the fab. Less costly automation is how I'd interpret this. Do you think lower yields would result? With single wafer processing, I can see why you can afford to pay a person to move one wafer at a time from machine to machine rather than pay Brooks $1M for a robot. If the person drops a wafer.... you only lose a wafer, not a batch of 12 or 24. What you say is clearly evident in consumer electronics. Back in the 1990's I thought every PCB would be fully automated. I was shown recently at a top SOX company that their products go into household products that are built with hand insertion of leaded components with a single side solder bath! They push much of the electronics up into a few big chips then basically hand assemble them with the cheapest technologies in China. All the Value Added is in the chips made by companies Cary likes. Only where space is at a premium do folks pay for the costly multi layer, robot loaded PCBs. It was a real eye-opener! Kirk

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