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

To: tejek who wrote (82632)	12/10/1999 9:50:00 PM
From: Shane Geary	Respond to of 1572108

Ted - Re:"what is a reasonable period of time?" The fastest I've heard a fab to go from ground-breaking to production was about 9-10 months if I recall correctly. That seems incredibly fast to me - in my experience 18 months is more typical. However, this relies on a process being TRANSFERRED to the fab. A new process generation is likely to take 2 years from initial planning to volume production. So, it depends how much work AMD had/has to do to Motorola's HiP6L process. I can't answer that question apart from note that HiP6L is in production already in Motorola's fabs. My own feeling is that AMD do not require wafers from Fab 30 for a while yet and that they could certainly put out about 500-1000 wafers/week if they DID need to. AMD don't need Fab 30 right now because: (i) Fab 25 more than satisfied Athlon demand in Q3 (ii) Fab 25 was only running at 80% of rated ouput at that time (had a spare 1000 wfrs/week) (iii) That was on a 0.25um process. All wafer starts are on 0.18um now giving twice the die/wafer. On the other hand, Athlon demand should start exceeding Fab 25 capacity in Q1 or Q2 - when Dresden will come on line. So, in my opinion, Dresden is waiting for the demand, not the other way around.