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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (9991)	5/23/2004 7:19:38 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

Thanks for the helpful discussion, Cary. Have you come across these terms in Hickey's and Abelson's writings? I subscribe to Barrons, but not Hickey's High-Tech Strategist. A cursory search on Google contains several Hickey references to capacity utilization, but these are US manufacturing and tech manufacturing capacity utilization, and not specifically fab capacity utilization. [e.g., "I just finished reading Fred Hickey’s “The High Tech Strategist.” According to Fred, there is still plenty of excess capacity. Capacity utilization rates are the lowest in the tech world while manufacturing utilization rates are at a 20-year low at 74.3%." financialsense.com ] I doubt whether Hickey or Abelson has ever referred to technology nodes. Chinese capacity is mostly at 250 and 180 nanometers. Are these on 200 mm wafers exclusively? Do the fabs have room to expand when 300 mm upgrade becomes desirable. If the cost and price model of the new fab obsoletes the chips produced by the old, the old line switches to another chip which it can produce profitably, or it shuts down. Is there any way to accurately determine from a chip serial number what its line width is or the size of the wafer that it came from? The glut of semi capacity due to the bubble is gone...Is it possible for the Chinese to act imprudently enough to cause another glut? Only at 250 and 180 nanometer design rules, now. Very encouraging. Sam