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

To: Scumbria who wrote (61120)	6/9/1999 2:30:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573924

SCUMbria - Good News for AMD Shareholders - Intel will be wasting about 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS ! Look at this waste of money - Intel will be sinking $1.2 BILLION into a 300 mm wafer fab, 0.13 micron process and copper metallization ! Heck !@ AMD can get that stuff FREE from Motorola, right? And who needs 300 mm wafers anyhow, right ? Amd HAS 200 mm WAFER FABS AND that's all anybody will ever need, right ? Paul {=============================} Intel plans move to copper, cheaper wafers By Brooke Crothers Staff Writer, CNET News.com June 9, 1999, 11 a.m. PT URL: news.com Intel will start making chips with more advanced production techniques, including copper, to deliver less costly silicon for the age of Internet devices. Intel said today it will use larger "wafers" which will reduce manufacturing costs by 30 percent. Intel will also move to the next generation of production technology called "0.13." Motorola also said today that it has moved successfully to bigger wafers for making memory chips with Infineon Technologies, formerly Siemens Semiconductors. The wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor material on which the chip's circuits are formed. Both Intel and Motorola are moving to 300 millimeter wafer sizes from 200 millimeter. Intel said it will begin using these larger wafers on a next-generation, 0.13-micron production process with copper in 2002--about one year after it starts production on this new process. IBM was the first chip manufacturer to move to copper and is already making PowerPC chips using this technology which replace aluminum interconnects with copper. Generally, copper will allow for smaller and faster-running chips than aluminum would allow. "The road to the Internet is paved with silicon. With a billion computers connected to the Internet, a huge volume of silicon building blocks will be required," said Craig Barrett, Intel chief executive officer, in a statement. "The 300 mm wafers will help us get there more cost-effectively, and Intel believes it is the time for the industry to move to a new, larger wafer generation," he added. Intel is planning to supply chips for a host of Internet devices ranging from the standard PC to low-cost Internet appliances. The larger wafers make it more economical for Intel to meet the needs of these markets. The larger wafer size represents more than a doubling of the silicon wafer's surface versus today's standard 200 mm wafer, Intel said. The use of 300 mm wafers is expected to cut high-volume chip fabrication cost by 30 percent when compared to 200 mm wafer production costs, the company said in a statement. Meanwhile, the 0.13 copper technology will be introduced as a successor to today's 0.18 production technology. Generally, the smaller the size, the faster the chip and the more circuits can be packed together. So, 0.13 technology can realize faster chips with more features than 0.18 chips. "With our 0.18 micron process technology now in production, it is time to aggressively step up our pursuit of our next generation process technology development," explained Sunlin Chou, Intel vice president and general manager of the Technology and Manufacturing Group, in a statement. "We plan to be the first to ramp production on 0.13 micron technology with copper metallization, initially on 200 mm wafers, and then on 300 mm wafers." Intel said the new production process will produce advanced microprocessors and other semiconductor products that will be the future versions of the Pentium III, Pentium III Xeon, and Celeron processors. In addition, Intel's new IA-64 microprocessors will take advantage of this future manufacturing technology. Go to Front Door \| Enterprise