Why AMD can't afford to develop their own process, or compete:
eetimes.com
it is one thing to make one or two transistors work, it is quite another to take that into high-volume manufacturing, and you have you know thousands, millions of transistors work almost on the die, almost all the time. So that process was very challenging, which involved hundreds of people at our R&D center here at Oregon we have 600 PhDs from the best universities around the world, and it really took this hundreds of PhDs to work together to resolve many of these problems that came up along the way, whether it was integrating the NMOS and PMOS transistors on the same wafer, coming up ways to that, and then solving all the defect problems and process capabilities problem that originated when putting this law into practice.
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if you look at the 45nm process that we are bringing to market right now, I think one of the unique advantages that we have as an integrated device manufacturer is that we have all of the capabilities in-house, all the way from making mask to developing the process technology doing the lithography development during the transistor development during the design activity for the microprocessor design and the package development as well. Having all of that inside one company, we feel it is a tremendous advantage going forward as the interaction between patterning, design-for-manufacturability, interactions between design and manufacturing become more and more prevalent, the ability to work well all together across organizational boundaries is the key to our success and for the success of the industry as well.
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We have heard many times about the impending demise of Moore's Law. I have heard it when I was a student and very respected professors will be citing all the reasons why they think Moore's Law will not survive, and you know the limitations they have highlighted, we have surpassed and gone past those.
What you see here is high-k metal gate, strain and other features, really highlighting the very innovative nature of this field, the people who work in this area. At least for the next 10 years or so, people will come up with more innovation and find ways of extending Moore's Law and show up with better products.
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