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

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (81623)	12/1/1999 11:55:00 AM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572777

Re: "Does this mean they will be throwing away huge volumes since this news stepping will also need to be tested before selling and spreading to all the other fabs....just in case they fix 1 bug and add 2? Like Windoes NT has done a few times." It is likely a small yield hit at this time but I'm just guessing. The "fix" will likely be rolled into the next stepping that was planned anyway and they'll just eat the yield hit until then. Incidently many stepping changes are done on the top metal layers only. This means existing wafers can be held in line until a new metal mask is generated. Only occasionally does a stepping require a full mask set. When you see stepping names like A3 or A4 it means only a metal mask change. An A4 - B0 change would indicate a full mask set. More time required for processing and qualification. A stepping change might be done for speed path improvement only which could be done in metal or depending on the root cause of the problem, something like this lockup problem might require an all layer fix to keep yields high. Intel was probably planning one anyway. It's got to be embarrassing but little more. EP