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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hepps who wrote (28181)	8/31/1999 10:54:00 AM
From: wily	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Here's part of the answer: Message 11086294 Advantest recently indicated that it will unveil its RM2 mass production RDRAM tester at SEMIcon Japan in December and will commence shipments in early 2000. The RM2 can test 64 RDRAMs in parallel within 30-40 seconds using a one-pass testing approach. This results in a 10x performance increase over current approach and will directly lower test costs over time

To: Hepps who wrote (28181)	8/31/1999 10:54:00 AM
From: sam	Respond to of 93625

I suspect it won't mean too much...especially in the scheme of things.

To: Hepps who wrote (28181)	8/31/1999 11:13:00 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

John, What is the impact of this one company being late (if that is the case). With any luck, no impact for Intel/Rambus. If Teradyne's tester isn't ready, potential customers should be able to go to HP or the other companies already shipping Rambus testers.

To: Hepps who wrote (28181)	8/31/1999 11:15:00 AM
From: wily	Respond to of 93625

More on testers from the ebn Tate interview: Q: On the back end, we've heard some concern that the testing infrastructure is still not in place to people's satisfaction. A, because of the expense, but B, because of the fact that the likes of HP, Teradyne, Advantest, haven't come out with the ability to do single-pass testing... Can you address that issue? A: At this point, all of the tester companies, HP, Schlumberger, Advantest, and Teradyne have announced Rambus systems, and have shipped mass production systems. All of those four companies have testers that are completely capable of single-pass test right now, but nobody in their right mind would use them for single pass right now for economic reasons. The DRAM industry is very constrained on capital, so you want to make your capital work hard, as much as possible, and when you think about testing in Rambus DRAM, there's two things you've got to do. You've got to make sure the core is working okay. A long time ago, we designed a mode into the Rambus DRAM where you can test that using the low frequency testers. They have a lot of low frequency testers sitting around, they're not using them, so why not use those at the core, and only use these new expensive testers for testing the interface. So it's a two pass test. Arguably, if you were buying testers from scratch you'd buy the new testers exclusively, because they can test the core even faster and the cost to test will end up in the long term being the same or lower than SDRAM. If you're tight on capital, if you have to lay out new money, you'll want to get the most out of that, so this two-pass test is what most of our partners are going to do, initially.