LSI Logic Expected To Announce Process For Smaller Chips
The Wall Street Journal -- March 23, 1998
Technology:
MILPITAS, Calif. -- LSI Logic Corp. is expected to announce today it has created a new manufacturing process that will enable it to stay on the path of creating smaller and faster custom semiconductor chips for the next generation of consumer electronics devices.
Wilf Corrigan, chief executive officer of LSI, said the new process -- which can create circuits of 0.18 microns in width, or less than 1/500th the width of a human hair -- will enable a vast array of new consumer devices with multiple functions.
With its last generation manufacturing process, LSI was able to create a single "system on a chip" in products such as digital cameras, cellular telephones and digital video disk players. But the new process, which will be in mass production in mid-1999, will make possible chips with 26 million components known as gates; enough for "multiple systems on a single chip" for devices such as office copiers that integrate fax, phone, copier, and printer in the same machine, Dr. Corrigan said.
He speculated that the technology can be used to build chips for igital set-top boxes with the universal ability to handle cable TV, satellite, broadcast and telephone transmissions.
Mark Edelstone, analyst at Morgan Stanley, said the new process will put LSI at the top of the pack, but he expects competitors such as International Business Machines Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., and Texas Instruments Inc. to have similar processes available in the same time frame. In addition, companies like Intel Corp. will likely transfer most production to the new process more rapidly than LSI, he said. |
