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

To: Whiskey who wrote (13257)	12/14/1997 6:02:00 PM
From: davesd	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Whiskey, fabs will buy new equipment to add to existing fabs, but this type of purchases will not support the $1.7 billion that AMAT has not will it support the current rev levels. Comapnies have to have money to invest in new technology...commodity chip makers have had poor cash flow for over 2 years....some of them are just lucky to be in business. The current leading edge technology is 200mm .25u (and the yields are still questionable)...alot of campanies have invested millions in 200mm .35u and .3u in the last 2 years. These tools have not paid for themselves yet and have not been depreciated. The question you have to ask yourself is how much benefit is there to go from .3u to .25u?? at a cost of over a billion dollars per fab?? Plus I still don't know of any FAB that is manufacturing commodity chips at .25u..and that is because the yeilds aren't upto PAR. 300mm and .18u is a wet dream....Pilot lines will be implemented soon, but don't expect to see any significant adopation of the technology till 2000 and beyond. At this point all DRAM makers and soon all commodity makes will be losing money...so there is no payback for new equipment in my opinion. dave