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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff R who wrote (60940)	6/8/1999 5:33:00 AM
From: Process Boy	Respond to of 1573599

Jeff - <A Fab has to be designed from the start to be a Cu Fab. Cooper is an extreme contaminate to normal silicon processing. I was told that the Copper metalization process has to be specially isolated from the rest of the Fab equipment, etc..> This is not as much of a problem as you may believe. It is not impossible to retrofit a 200mm fab to handle Cu. It does take money however. <Dresden (Fab 30) may run some Al processing but Texas (Fab 25) will never run Cu.> See above. <Every wonder why Intel downplays the roll of Cu and instead has concentrated on Low Kv dielectrics? They can't install Cu in any of their recently built Fabs because they don't have the setup. Intel will have to spend some of their 20 Billion in cash to build new Fabs. I'm sure that Intel's new 300mm facilities will all have Cu.> This is not the reason Intel did not go to Cu for .18. As I have posted many times, Intel has reservations about process maturity of Cu at this time. Intel is onboard for Cu, probably for .13. Could either be 200mm or 300mm, assuming Intel announces a 300mm program. For now, Intel believes Al will be more than a sufficient interconnect material for .18. As for the low-k dielectrics, Intel's .18 uses fairly low risk SiOF (Fluorinated SiO). SiOF is not considered nearly as exotic as some low-k stuff being evaluated out there. PB