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Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation
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To: shane forbes who wrote (12488)5/18/1998 11:43:00 AM
From: Grand Poobah  Read Replies (1) of 25814
 
Shane,

At this point the Cu process is more expensive than the established Al process because the technology and supporting infrastructure is in its infancy. In a couple generations there will probably be little difference in cost, although Cu may be a little cheaper because the Cu damascene process is more straightforward (hard to know until it is more widely implemented which problems will be expensive to overcome and which will not).

I glossed over some of the technical details in my last post. I wish you could see the graph I have in front of me; it explains it so clearly. What is really going on here and what I left out of my previous explanation is that there are two competing effects going on. Decreasing the size of the transistor decreases the time it takes the transistor to switch. This has been the driving force in the speed improvements of ICs over the last decade. However, the corresponding decrease in the size and spacing of the interconnecting wires increases their resistance and capacitance and slows them down. For a long time interconnect speed had a negligible effect, but now it is becoming important and will dominate over the transistor speed for 0.13-micron and below processes. The combined speed of the transistor switching and the Al interconnect reaches a maximum around the 0.25-micron generation and then actually starts to get WORSE, and worse dramatically at 0.13 micron and below. The combination of the transistor and a Cu interconnect scheme reaches a maximum speed around the 0.13-micron generation but remains fairly constant for a few generations after that. So the comparison numbers between Al and Cu in my last post are for the speed of both the transistor and the interconnect.

G.P.
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