Formerly About Applied Materials Message Board

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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials

AMAT 328.51

+1.9%

Feb 2 3:59 PM EST

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To: Big Bucks who wrote (8179)	9/26/1997 3:53:00 AM
From: Toby	of 70976

re: IBM's copper and IP IBM as a policy licenses all of its inventions to all comers. It makes $1B/year doing so, according to the WSJ. IBM's VP of Si John Kelly said that "Nobody has approached us about licensing". This isn't surprising because the patents haven't been granted and IBM just announced this thing Monday. It _has_ been known for years that IBM has been ahead in Cu, probably as a result of their invention of CMP, the last 'great thing' in Si. IBM probably has patents on the diffusion barrier and a few other tricks. Competitors have the choice of developing their own approach thereby losing time and spending considerable sums, or licensing the IBM process. Everybody who manufactures semiconductors has an IBM license already (they have that much Intellectual Property) and next year or whenever when the patent portfolio comes up for relicensing, Cu will be in the package, and the overall price will be higher. That's how the game works. I predict therefore that many manufacturers will find it most cost effective to add to the their IBM license portfolio and sign up for Cu, rather than spend time and money reinventing and slightly modifying the wheel. IBM will have better Si chips in the near term and a long term guaranteed revenue stream as a result. In this way, Cu is no different from CMP, the single transistor memory cell, or any of the other myriad Si inventions which IBM has given the world. INTC sells more chips and has roughly comparable Si technology to IBM, but has never been in the league of IBM and TI when it comes to inventing the processes that put those wonderful circuit designs of INTC's into the Si.

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