Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices Message Board

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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: Time Traveler who wrote (24599)	10/13/1997 11:12:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	of 1578133

John; When AMD makes their chips they buy silicon wafers and process them into chips with an intricate process involving etching, vapor deposition, ion implantation and other steps, each of which must be done to exact standards in the complete absence of dust(one spec of dust can ruin the trace for one transistor and the chips which may have 1,000,000 transistors might not work) If a piece of silicone has the area for 1000 chips and it gets 1000 pieces of dust on it your yield can be zero(not really as some will have two dust bits and some none), in addition all the 20 or so processes that make the chip have to be fine tuned and varied slightly, and each stage is dust susceptable. So when they first start up they might get 20 chips out of 1000. This is bad yield. As they work to eliminate dust and optimize all the 20+ stages they can get a higher and higher yield. This is what AMD is now doing. Fine tuning the process to get more good chips from the same amount of silicon. Since they test the chips prior to packing the only extra cost is the final package(as Petz says). In addition to fine tuning the yield they can also fine tune the speed, optimising for faster chips. So costs will not rise dramatically but profits could increase dramatically. A $1000 wafer that yields 1000 CPUs is $1 each. If it yields 1 CPU that is $1000 each. I think they use 300 MM wafers which are around $1000(anyone know 300MM prices??) and that is capable of as many as 5000 CPUs depending on yield and die size(they call them a silica die, or dice plural, as they are gotten from dicing the final processed silicon wafer) Anyone know how many AMD gets from one 300 MM wafer?? So we are all hoping for some kind of dramatic turnaround for AMD if they get their act together. Bill

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