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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (76583)	10/22/1999 9:34:00 PM
From: Craig Freeman	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574098

Paul, this article popped up at anandtech.com: intel.com According to the text, "Wacker Siltronic produces around 800 ingots, enough to create more than 500,000 wafers." If my math is right, that means that an ingot produces 625 wafers. The article goes on to price these ingots at a maximum value of $16,000. Which equals to $25.60 per wafer. Finally, it states "An eight-inch wafer, seen here under inspection light, will host more than 200 Pentium II processor chips." Simple math therefore equates one PII chip with 13 CENTS worth of silicon. I don't know if the author is right but if he is, then the cost of raw silicon for a CPU is less than the cost of a single cigarette. Even if you assume miserable yields, it should still be well under a buck per chip. Paul ... in your opinion, is the author correct? Craig

To: Paul Engel who wrote (76583)	10/23/1999 3:02:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574098

Paul, I read somewhere that by changing the aspect ratio of memory cell capacitors they have the requisite amount of capacitance but take a smaller amount of real estate. Going from .25 to .18 halves the area and all other things equal will double the density of the memory laid out. If, in addition, the cells can be made smaller but deeper(of course I speak of the charge storage capacitor for the memory cell, that which holds the charge which is refreshed with dynamic ram, static does not have this, the strictly surface based features like lines etc are not affected. Bill