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

To: Ian@SI who wrote (13273)	12/14/1997 10:09:00 PM
From: davesd	Respond to of 70976

Ian..that's they build pilot lines in R&D....so when the time is right they roll out the new technology. They cannot afford not to build pilot lines and they cannot afford to rool out every new technology that comes out....they need to make strategic decisions as to which tech to use and what to pass up.....they only have so much money to spend. One of the biggest elements in the equation for producing commodity chips is yeild. DRAM made a .35u and .25u preforms pretty much the same in the PC...based on the yeild it may be cheaper to produce DRAM at .3u vs .25u. When it comes to CPUs...the line width is more important...yield is less of an issue since the performance of the chip improves the lower the geometry is. That is why INTC is using .25u on high end chips while DRAM manufactures are using .35u. dave