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

To: Larry Loeb who wrote (47059)	2/3/1998 2:35:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Larry - Re: "IBM and others expected to announce microprocessors with copper:" These are papers to be delivered that were submitted several months ago. The benefits of copper are real - they reduce the resistance of interconnects and hence reduce RC time constants, fringing capacitance, etc. IBM's "test chip" also us made in 0.2 micron technology - even more aggressive than what anybody makes today. It comes down to how well the copper technology can be put into place and yields on that technology. Intel I believe is being more conservative. I think they are sticking with their stacked Ti/Tin/AlCu but thickening up the films, resulting in higher aspect ratios - resulting in a similar reduction in resistance (R = rho*l/A - rho = resistivity of conductor, l = length of conductor, and A = cross sectional area of the conductor). Increasing the area, A, reduces the resistance, R. As noted, Intel will describe a 450 MHz Deschutes at this same conference and in early April will begin delivery of 350 and 400 MHz versions of this chip as well as a 100 MHz 440BX chip set. You should also note that Intel will be delivering a paper on a 450 MHz SRAM - 512 KiloBytes - which will be the FULL SPEED L2 cache SRAM used in the SLOT 2 versions of the Deschutes processor. Paul