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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: StockMan who wrote (22646)9/5/1997 2:16:00 AM
From: Yousef   of 1572242
 
StockMan,

Re: "This may right now be the only salvation. Since their Fab25 is a mess."

I feel very sorry for the people involved with Fab25 in Austin. I have
personally been in a similar situation of ramping volume in a process
that is not manufacturable (low yields). This is NOT fun. But actually
where I feel that AMD has "messed up" is in their Process Development Model.

Let me explain, AMD has a development model where IC processes are
developed in the Bay Area (Santa Clara) and then transferred to a
volume manufacturing site. This model has many problems:

1) What baseline process is running in Santa Clara (SC) ?? Are they running
the AMD .35um process at a reasonable volume (as a baseline in Santa Clara)?? If not then the defect density will be high as they do their
development work on the .25um process.

2) Is the equipment set identical between SC and Austin ?? If not then
new problems will arise as the process comes up in Austin and SC will
have a hard time "debuggging" the problem. Sharing of "best practices"
and solutions is harder.

3) This is a very expensive way of doing process development !! All the
baseline material is typically NOT sold to customers, so the tendancy
is to keep the SC volume relatively low and the process can NOT be fully
characterized without volume. Also, the Bay Area is about the most
expensive place in the country to pay for technical people, real estate for buildings, permitting for expansions is difficult ...

Yousef's Recommendation to AMD: Move your process development efforts
from SC to Austin. Develop your future processes where you will do
your first manufacturing. This allow you to leverage the existing
.35um process (or .5um process ...) to establish a low defect density
baseline from which to make changes as you go to the next generation.
All this baseline material is by definition, production material that
is sold to customers. Austin is a much (much) lower cost operating
environment as compared to the Bay Area. Then copy the equipment and
process exactly as you bring up other mfg sites (like Dresden).

BTW, this is essentially the Intel process development model with just
a change to the location of cities.

Make It So,
Yousef
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