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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (34073)	3/29/2001 3:35:40 AM
From: Artslaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Both IBM and AMD have given strong signals that .13 without SOI doesn't buy much. Of course IBM says that--they poured lots of money into researching it. AMD did some sort of FLASH-for-process deal with Motorola and got their Cu/SOI process, so it's not surprising they are also on the SOI bandwagon. AMD is not a company known for its process innovations anyway, so I'd take their acceptance with a grain of salt. IBM I respect, Intel's not too bad, but AMD? Not in the process area. Particularly hilarious is that shortly after both IBM and AMD announced they were going to SOI on .13, Intel released some research with great fanfare saying they weren't because very low K devices on .9 didn't benefit from SOI. They were silent on what good it might do for .13 on moderate K substraits. Let me disclose that I just went short AMD (as of yesterday), but not because of the SOI issue! With regard to Intel (which I'm eying for buying), changing from bulk substrate to SOI costs lots of money in re-tooling (not to mention a total overhaul of your chip design). If Intel can get by 0.13 on bulk and then switch dielectrics and keep going shorter on bulk without ever switching to SOI, God bless 'em! Also, you are misinformed with regard to Intel's stand on SOI--they have been quite forward about their opinion of SOI. They say it gets increasingly less useful as the channel length scales shorter, so it's good for 0.18 and increasing less useful for shorter channel lengths. Here's a good article on it, in fact: eetimes.com. I attend a couple conferences a year, and they've always said that (which makes the round-table discussions and workshops much more entertaining). Personally, I don't like SOI because I think it's harder to use for design and has poor thermal properties, but those sorts of practical issues aren't typically considered. Regards, Steve