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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Aaron Cooperband who wrote (44652)	1/9/1998 2:33:00 PM
From: Jules V	Respond to of 186894

Tillamook P266 notebooks Monday. PII notebooks next month. news.com

To: Aaron Cooperband who wrote (44652)	1/10/1998 2:08:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Aaron - Re: "So, Intel's 0.18 micron process should be ramping at about the same time as AMD is ramping their 0.25 micron process in their production fab?" The 0.18 micron process will be running first silicon Merced and probably a shrunken Deschutes or a Katmai/Mendocino chip to debug the process. Intel generally begins initial production in one of their own Development Fabs - I think the 0.18 micron process is being brought up in D2B - Oregon). As the volume rises, Intel has historically built a new Development fab and transferred the older one to a complete production facility. This avoids a major "hiccup" in transitioning from development to production. Once critical yields levels are achieved, Intel will target an existing fab to bring up the new process - or even a new one. Fab 10 in Ireland started up on a new 8 inch 0.6 micron BiCMOS process in 1992/1993 without a hitch. Likewise, Fab 12 initially ramped up on a 0.35 micron process (Pentium) in 1996 with spectacular yields. These are the results of well characterized wafer fab processes developed and debugged by Intel's TD group. AMD has been trying to ramp the 0.25 micron process for several months sicne August - They have not reached critical mass yet - so by the time Intel begins initial Merced manufacturing (low volume) AMD may have had time to get the bugs out of their 0.25 micron process in Austin/FAB 25 - the Fab Formerly Known as The MEGAFAB ! Intel's lead in process technology has compressed in some areas - expanded in others. Their yields are tremendous -Barrett discussed this at the November analyst meeting - one day after AMD announced their continuing yield difficulties. And their process performance is superb - witness the high speed of their devices - and HIGH AVAILABILITY. However, Intel has made certain trade-offs - their circuit density is less than AMD/IBM's (and even IDT/Centaur) processes with local interconnect - and that has given AMD a tremendous die size (K6) advantage over Intel's Pentium II and Deschutes. But AMD has proven that small die size means nothing if you can't manufacture the part in high yields. Paul