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

To: Petz who wrote (70636)	9/1/1999 7:50:00 PM
From: Shane Geary	Respond to of 1574007

Petz - Re: "losing one "lot" of wafers does not strike me as a disaster, if the source of the contamination was found." I don't know if this is sarcasm on your part, but it is far more likely that you lose many lots than a single lot in these situations. Cu contamination is not monitored on every lot - I wonder how often it is tested for? I suppose that you could run a test wafer through every exposed tool once per day and then test for metallics using SIMS or TXRF or some analysis technique. Even if one high throughput tool (and the tools which are likely to get contaminated are probably all high throughput, like wet benches and clean tools) was affected you could be talking many hundreds of wafers per day of exposure. Hey - it happens. And the best time for it to happen is before volume production, but on the other hand it wouldn't give much confidence in it not happening again (in a different mechanism). On a different issue - how long does it take for this damn fab to ramp up????? Groundbreaking was 3 years ago!! I've never seen a fab take this long - there must have been huge amounts of chopping and changing over the past 3 years. From amd.com Fab 30 Project Timeline December 1995 AMD announces its Dresden project October 1996 Ground breaking for facility May 1997 Cornerstone ceremony September 1997 Topping off ceremony May 1998 Clean room ready for equipment November 1998 Start of First Silicon December 1998 First yielding SRAMs January 1999 First yielding AMD-K6® family processors Q1 1999 Begin installation of copper tools Q2 99 Start of first copper lots (AMD-K6 family processors) Planned for Q4 99 Start of AMD Athlon processor production

To: Petz who wrote (70636)	9/2/1999 1:21:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1574007

Petz - Re: ", losing one "lot" of wafers does not strike me as a disaster, if the source of the contamination was found." One Lot ? I heard AMD lost A MONTH's WORTH of WAFERS in Progress. By the way - have you ever seen a fab while EVERY QUARTZ Diffusion/Oxidation TUBE is removed and TRASHED - and every process chamber is shut down, disassembled, cleaned, recleaned, and recleaned again, etc., etc. Guess how much production goes on when this panic reaction takes place? Paul