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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul V. who wrote (9161)	10/21/1997 11:09:00 PM
From: davesd	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Paul, 300mm is far from ready for production...as a matter of fact several pieces are still missing to complete a 300mm pilot line. Once they are all available, it will still take at least another 18 months or so to get the yeilds to a point that 300mm saves money over 200mm. Also, remember 300mm tools will generally be 30 to 40% higher cost than 200mm. dave

To: Paul V. who wrote (9161)	10/21/1997 11:25:00 PM
From: Big Bucks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Hi Paul V, You said: >>Therefore, it appears that for the semi's to become more profitable they must first purchase the equipment from the equipment makers. << The question should be," when will they purchase the equipment" and also consider they need to have fab space to put the equipment into a production environment. The transiition to 300mm and sub 0.25uM geometries will take considerable time to implement for several key reasons. 1st- the entire equipment set and "semi-standards" needs to be agreed upon and implemented. All the necessary support equipment and production (not beta) manufactured equipment needs to be fully functional and capable of meeting the manufacturing production schedule of the chip makers, they won't risk trying to make product on unproven or unreliable equipment, the expense is just to high to make a mistake and order equipment that can't meet the mission critical aspects required.. 2nd- Each shrink in device geometries causes a whole new set of problems that need to be understood and remedied prior to commiting product to the market. No one wants to sell a product that may have unknown reliability issues that crop up 6 months after it is sold, recalls can kill a product/manufacturer. 3rd- All the equipment and new technologies must be tuned to work in harmony to estabish a viable and smooth production flow. This means that all the bugs need to be worked out of the system to insure repeatable and high quality production output, this takes time to understand the problems and engineer around the obstacles. 4th- The product must start making money, which means that the market has to be ready to assimilate the new products being manufactured. If the market isn't there the product could fail or not be profitable. There are other roadblocks ahead, these changes in methodolgy and innovation take time and planning to implement. Just my opinion, regards, BB