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

To: smooth2o who wrote (243181)	11/1/2007 12:30:59 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"So, you're saying something changed since this report from Oct:" All I can tell you is this Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL) has reportedly won the high-k dielectrics fab-tool business within IBM Corp.'s "fab club" or technology alliance, according to sources. TEL and IBM have been working on high-k for some time, sources said. IBM is using TEL's CVD-based tool for use in developing gate stacks for logic ICs at the 45-nm node and beyond, sources added. IBM's technology alliance members include AMD, Chartered, Infineon and Samsung. TEL is also set to ship a system to Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s 300-mm fab in Dresden, Germany, sources said. eetimes.com Hmm. Remembered wrong. I thought it had already shipped.

To: smooth2o who wrote (243181)	11/1/2007 2:39:19 PM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 275872

AMD has one big advantage over Intel at the 45nm node, namely the ability to push out the adoption of high-k dielectrics and metal gates until the 32nm node due to the use of SOI wafers. That is one of the worst journalistic statements in a long time ! SOI wafers do not help in reducing total leakage currents in todays processor chips. Todays quiescent currents are dominated by Gate leakage and Ioff current leakage, as I discussed at length yesterday. SOI reduces junction leakage, which is always insignificant, of the order of microamaps, and maybe a few milliamps. The author of the statement is thinking of 1000+nm technology, when gate leakage and Ioff were zero, and junction leakage was dominant. Not having HiK is very nice for the process engineer, since he does not have to deal with the new unknowns, since this is the biggest change in 30 years. But not having HiK, when your competitor has it,is a disaster for the company.