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

To: tejek who wrote (81271)	11/29/1999 12:25:00 AM
From: Charles R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572777

Ted, <so you are saying we have no idea how many chips per wafer?> Yes, that and a few other things. Look at it this way - AMD will be producing K6-2+s, Athlon selects, Athlons, Athlon Pros, and Athlon Ultras over the span of next 12 months (and possibly some Flash on Fab 25). It is very hard to estimate what the unit ouput will be unless one makes a number of assumptions. The variability of these assumptions can be large - especially if Athlon with built-in L2 becomes the mainstream. At this time I think one can reasonably predict a baseline of 2-3Mu Athlon varients and 2-3 Mu K6-2+s from Fab25. Anything above that should pretty much come from Dresden. By the way, the baseline is sufficient for about $1B+ in revenues per quarter so that is nothing to mock at (including Flash and other processor stuff). < BTW the more I look at the numbers, Dresden appears to be a fairly small fab although there is considerable room for expansion and I am sure the Germans would be happy to accommodate.> Dresden, once on-line, should become a large fab rather quickly. At full capacity we are talking about potentially $2B in revenues per quarter! Chuck

To: tejek who wrote (81271)	11/29/1999 2:08:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1572777

ted, re:<chips per wafer> I'm still catching up on posts from the last day or so, but noticed no one really answered your question about how many Athlons can be expected from each wafer. The math is really pretty simple. 8" wafers have a useable radius of 10cm, therefore their area pi-r-squared is about 31,400 cm sqared. The die size of the Athlon is something like 104 sq. mm -- I think it was one-sixty-something in 0.25µ process. Using 104 sq. mm, we get 302 die per wafer. However, since there is waste space around each CPU and waste space around the edge of the round wafer, you have to subtract 10-20% (process guys would know the exact formula for waste space). That leaves 240 Athlons per wafer if the yield was 100%. I would be ecstatic if AMD had 50% yield already on the 0.18 process. There are other reasons that production does not equal the anticipated value, such as packaging failures, SRAM or PC board failures, entire wafers are sometimes bad or get wrecked,etc. Remember also that, for most of Q4's output, the die size was 16X mm, with maybe only 40-50 good Athlons out of 150 per wafer. Petz