** Intel and 300mm **
You won't find this anywhere on SI <g>. Semi Equipment Investors will recall the recent hoopla over 300mm transition which shot stocks like PRIA beyond the realm of reasonable valuation. Here is a technical article from INTC which may have fueled that speculation.
developer.intel.com
Excerpt:
"The overall industry slowdown has reached historic proportions, and the
lack of a startup date has made management of the suppliers more
difficult than usual, but not impossible. We have weathered the dog days
of summer 1998 when layoffs in the equipment industry became routine,
when the world's largest supplier withdrew from I300I undermining
I300I's importance and seeming to threaten it with extinction, when at
SEMICON West senior managers from various sides met but seemed
near fisticuffs, when banner headlines in the San Francisco Bay area
papers announced the death of 300mm, when every pundit, no matter
how small, offered their opinion on the demerits of the industry transition,
and when our own selection teams declined to fulfill program
commitments because they felt management was itself not committed to
continuing the program. Ignoring all the negativity, we are focussing on
the critical task of getting the data on tool production worthiness, by
working extensively with I300I, with suppliers, and with key groups at
Intel.
As we enter the last quarter of 1998, we are vigorously exercising a
process to review the teams' equipment data tool-by-tool, anticipating the
Third Risk Assessment before year's end. As of this writing, we expect
that approximately 80% of the required tools will be ready for selection
and a January 2000 startup. As for the remaining 20% of the tools, there
are no known showstoppers; they will just need to be managed carefully.
Overcapacity is driving manufacturers to extend the useful life of 200mm
equipment where ever possible. The 200mm era, in the sense of new
construction of 200mm lines by the major manufacturers, is effectively
over. The next big opportunity for the suppliers is 300mm. The
forecasted productivity of the 300mm equipment looks very good,
appearing to come close to capital productivity targets, as shown with
historical perspective in Figure 7. If the forecasts are borne out in
practice, then 300mm will seem a much more attractive alternative to
using 200mm fabs, even those where the equipment set is largely
depreciated. When the realization of this counterintuitive result sinks in, as
it has here, the industry will make the transition much more rapidly than it
did when it went to 200mm10. The first year in which this will have a big
impact on suppliers' revenue is 2000, and the first year it will have an
impact on manufacturers' cost is 2002, possibly as late as 2003. This
impact, as measured by die cost reduction, will be twice as large as that
of any wafer size conversion in our short history. The two lessons we
should take away from this are that such transitions should be planned as
an industry and that wafer size should increase by at least 50%."
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