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Technology Stocks : Micron Only Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DavidG who wrote (23652)	11/7/1997 5:05:00 PM
From: davesd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

BOISE, Idaho--Reacting to criticism from other memory manufacturers who say Micron Technology Inc. has played unfairly as DRAM prices have fallen, a Micron executive said the Boise-based company did what it had to do to remain financially viable during one of the worst downturns in the industry's history. "We have to make money on DRAMs," said Jeff Mailloux, Micron's DRAM marketing manager. "We don't have any choice. We're not a huge, diversified company, and that has driven the things we've done in terms of aggressive shrinks and cost reduction." Mailloux noted that in February 1996, Micron put its planned fab in Lehi, Utah, on indefinite hold, a move that decreased the company's potential wafer starts by 50%. Solely through process shrinks to 0.3 micron and a conversion of all its capacity to 8-inch wafers from 6-inch wafers, Micron has been able to double bit output of DRAMs over the past year, Mailloux said. Plans to move to 0.25-micron and smaller geometries over the next year could double bit output again in 1998 without additional fabs, he said. Mailloux added that other DRAM producers have not reduced production, but have only limited the size of production increases throughout the DRAM downturn. "Where things end up being different from a lot of our competitors is many of them are still operating older fabs they haven't upgraded,and have not converted their production to the latest technologies," Mailloux maintained. dave