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

To: Clarksterh who wrote (15054)	1/26/1998 3:38:00 PM
From: Teri Skogerboe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Clark, Many thanks for your reply. I do realize, of course, that going from .35 to .25 requires new equipment. (Gee, how could anyone not know that??) My argument is that this alone may not be good enough. We have been discussing the outlook for '98. AMAT, itself on the last CC, was predicting flat revenues for '98. In your opinion, do you see their prediction of flat revenues for '98 as being optimistic or pessimistic, based on the information we have today, like other equips conference calls, for example? Also, I never meant to argue that the number of chips in this world will not continue to grow. I fully believe that the number of chips will continue to grow. When the chipmakers need to add capacity, we will see a real boom in the front-end makers, IMO. This event does not seem to be right around the corner. Regards, Teri Some news below. (It's a new story, but basically "old" news.) Weekly News Analysis for Senior Industry Executives Monday, Jan. 26, 1998 Vol. 6, No. 32 c 1998, CMP Media Inc. By Robert Henkel The following is a summary and analysis of stories appearing in the Jan. 26 editions of Electronic Buyers' News and EE Times. Why chip gear business is worried This has to be the worst news coming out of the Semicon Korea show in Seoul this past week. Total capital investments expected to be made this year by Korea's chip makers, which normally buy about 10% of the chip equipment sold globally, will be less than what any one of the Big 3 Korean firms spent in '96. The '98 total, according to the Korean Semiconductor Industry Association, will be less than $2 billion. This would be down from about $3 billion in '97 and $7 billion in '96, Anthony Cataldo and David Lammers report in EE Times. In '96, LG Semicon alone spent $2.7 billion, Samsung $2.2 billion, and Hyundai $2.1 billion, says Dataquest Asia's J.H. Son. Move to 300-mm off again The big move to the 300-mm wafer is off again. This time it's the cash-strapped Asian chip makers that are delaying plans to move to the larger 12-inch wafer lines by at least a year, equipment suppliers told EE Times at Seoul this past week at Semicon Korea. Chip makers and their equipment suppliers had planned to start as many as nine pilot lines this year and move to production in 2000, Anthony Cataldo and David Lammers report in EE Times. Now, pilot lines will likely start in late '98 or '99, and first production lines aren't expected now until 2001, says Murray Bullis, SEMI director of 300-mm wafer standards. New direction for Cisco Cisco Systems CTO Ed Kozel has long given the same advice on the public switched telephone network as energy analyst Amory Lovins gives about Washington: ignore it and maybe it will go away. But at this next week's ComNet show, Cisco will explain why it is now convinced that data, voice, and video will converge on standard packet-switched networks. While asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) plays an important transport role in this vision, Cisco no longer puts it at the center of the equation as the great traffic equalizer, Loring Wirbel writes in EE Times. ...snip... techweb.cmp.com

To: Clarksterh who wrote (15054)	2/2/1998 4:05:00 PM
From: Teri Skogerboe	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

Clark, BB, All, <<A technical question>> Re: "Second, by the same reasoning, there should never been any new plants built." I meant to reply to this last week, but was side-tracked or something. But I don't see the logic in the above statement. I was saying that chip capacity would essentially increase ~ 75% with the shrink from .35 to .25. This "new supply" of chips would only "keep up" for ~ 1 to 1.5 years, or until enough time passes that demand can catch up. Re: "Shrinking alone can't keep up - it keeps up only with the number of transistors on any given chip." Please read the story below. ------------------------- FOLSOM, Calif. -- Trying to regain lost market share and boost sales for its flash memories, Intel Corp. this week will announce plans to spend $1 billion over the next two years to convert its Fab 9 flash memory plant to run a 0.25-micron process using 8-inch wafers. The process, which will be almost identical to the one used on the company's Pentium II lines, will enable Intel to eventually scrap its EPROM-based process. Intel expects to start shipping a 16-Mbit flash based on the new process in the second quarter, followed shortly by 8-Mbit boot-block and 64-Mbit Strataflash chips. By 1999, Intel will use the process to produce 1.8-volt boot-block parts and 3-V Strataflash devices, company officials said. The new process will yield four times as many chips per wafer as Intel's current process, and will increase production capacity and improve margins. techweb.cmp.com ------------------------ Re: "The new process will yield four times as many chips per wafer as Intel's current process, and will increase production capacity and improve margins." How are these two statements reconciled? Restated, my question is, from the Intel story, my take says the number of chips are increased by "four times", not just the number of transistors per chip. Thanks for any insight on this, Teri