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To: Bill Jackson who wrote (21769)12/6/2000 11:53:11 PM
From: fyodor_Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 275872
 
Bill: I am not sure we read the same places. I have one price of $75,000 per kilo of pure Si28 that backs out to about $40 per CPU if 200 survive from a solid Si28 wafer and is 37 cents for an epi wafer.

Ahh ok, I see what you're saying now.

I have no idea how many wafers can be made form a kg of Si, so I just used the "per chip" numbers cited by Isonics. They may be overly optimistic.

If the price comes to something like 40 bucks a chip, I doubt it would make sense, economically, since 40 bucks extra in materials would probably add something like 80 bucks to the consumer price. Unless the benefits of isotopical purity are VERY significant, I don't think anything above a $10 increase per chip is acceptable. Of course, if most of the performance increase could be leveraged by using epitaxially grown Si-28 wafers at a fraction of the price, then that might be the way to go.

-fyo



To: Bill Jackson who wrote (21769)12/7/2000 11:02:58 AM
From: pgerassiRead Replies (2) | Respond to of 275872
 
Dear Bill:

How do you come to your figures? From efunda, the density of Si is 2.33kg/l (liter) for normal silicon, and that includes some Si29 and Si30 within so, it is an upper bound. Thus a cylinder of Si28 with a diameter of 200mm and 100mm high has 3.142l in it. Thus the mass of that cylinder is 2.33*3.142kg or 7.32kg. At $75K/kg, that comes to $549,000 for the cylinder. At a thickness of 1mm per wafer, and that is generous, that works out to $5,490 a wafer or at 200 good die per wafer, $27.45 a good die or 2/3rds of your quoted cost. At a thickness of 0.36mm for the wafer, it would work out to just under $10 per good die.

Their (Isonics) numbers do not seem to be that far off.

Pete