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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Cirruslvr who wrote (46439)1/18/1999 12:12:00 AM
From: kash johal  Read Replies (1) of 1571931
 
Cirruslvr,

>Re: Paul - RE: "It wasn't a MASK problem, per se - it was a DESIGN >PROBLEM."
>If it was a design problem, wouldn't it have hurt their ability to >make ANY K6-2s?

You are getting somewhat confused methinks.

All processors have basic critical delay paths, some slower and faster than others. However as these chips operate at a clock frequency (or some multiple). So basically the chips are limited by the slowest paths and these become critical in limiting the chip speeds. Folks go out and incrementally improve speed paths over time and that is one way of improving the SPEED and binning yields.

In AMD's case they had difficulty getting to 400Mhz speeds and had to fix it with a design/layout change. The design change results in new improved metal masks being manufactured.

As far as Pauls 34% yield BS goes.

AMD said they produced 40K wafers in Q4. Not all of which resulted in shippable product. If we use 35K wafers as what 5.5M shipped units resulted from we see that the yield is 157 good DPW. With around 300 Gross Die Per Wafer we can see that yields are in 50%-55% range.

Not bad but not great.

With 60K wafer/month capacity coming on stream that means that AMD can ship 7-9M K6-2 equivalent die.

Although the k-3 is 50% bigger remember that at 0.18 micron the die will be similar to current k-6 size.

I think the current decline is way overdone and represents a great buying opportunity. And I have bought some more. If it drops to $20 I will buy some more. I suspect that we will see the uptick in February when the k-3's are introduced.

Regards,

Kash
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