Shane, re Intel's yields when going to more and more complex chips, how about this. They went from 8008 to 8080 to 8086 to 80186 to 286 to 386 to 486 to Pentium to Pentium MMX to Pentium Pro to Pentium II (may have missed one or two, especially in the real old days). There are no showstoppers on the horizon, and Moore's law looks good until something like 2013, when there may be tough problems to deal with in the line width, gate length, keeping these separate and not shorting, etc. Intel banged out the yields for all the products in their history, getting to, I'm guessing 75 to 85% at wafer probe when the process and any design bugs are eliminated. In fact, lately, they have been beating some schedules as far as getting to very acceptable yields, and beating schedule in getting more in the higher MHz bins.
I don't know how good LSI is in the harvest, or yield, area. IBM is still #1, Intel 2, probably Fujitsu next, maybe then Hitachi, TI, Motorola next. I have no idea where LSI would be. Why don't you ask? Well, semi companies guard their yield numbers like gold, unless they are always great. I don't know if this helps.
Tony |
