Rink,
Just to review, here is a Q/A on 45nm transition:
JoAnne Feeney - FTN MidWest
And then, it seemed like the move to 45-nanometer has been slowed a little bit. It seemed like that was originally planned for early or middle of ’08 and now you are talking about the end of ’08. Is that because you are just not seeing quite the uptake in terms of aggregate demand or there’s a lot of capacity in the industry at this point, so you don’t see any reason to rush that? How do we understand that?
Bertrand F. Cambou
The way you have to understand that is we don’t want to essentially confuse our manufacturing organizations. Right now, we are loading factory Spansion 1 at 65-nanometer 300-millimeter, and we want to have that transition to be flawless. And the 45 is going to follow right after that.
Now are we about the schedule where we are planning to be? Yes, I think as an industry, if you look at the business we are in, the 40, 45-nanometer migrations, these are late ’08 and I believe we are going to be consistent with the best-in-class memory company.
Don’t forget that at that point, we need immersion lithography. Those too are not cheap and there is some kind of maturity that we have to master before we go to high volumes. We are very pleased with the shrink ability of MirrorBit at 45-nanometer. We are very, very active on the program as we speak and are planning that to happen in the ’08 timeframe. seekingalpha.com |