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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (48989)	2/27/1998 12:06:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Mary - Re: "Do you think Craig Barrett would feel this way and if he does, is he up to the challenge and or will the organization give him enough support to execute properly?" I don't believe you have a full understanding of Craig Barrett's position in Intel and his past accomplishments. Craig has held a number of positions at Intel, but in 1985/1986 he was a director of assembly manufacturing. At that time, Intel threw in the towel on DRAMS and scaled back operations. Intel in 1985 had slipped from a wafer fab technology leader in the early to mid '70s to an also ran in the mid '80s. Barrett took over responsibility for wafer fab manufacturing at that time and commenced a resurrection (literally) of Intel's wafer fab manufacturing capability and technology development and deployment. Under Craig Barrett, Intel went from a hodge-podge of fabs (about 7 at that time), each running their own version of a Julia Child's cullinary cuisine to a streamlined, well coordinated manufacturing dynamo that it is today. He instituted policies that required minimum performance and yield standards on new technologies developed from the Technology Development groups and "Cradle to grave" responsibility for the TD group to push the new technologies into full production - as opposed to the "standard" way of throwing the technology over the wall and letting manufacturing figure it all out. Moreover, Barrett instituted strict standardization within each wafer fab as to the equipment used in each fab, how it was set up, operated and maintained. Instead of each fab running its own recipes, Barrett brought a uniform procedure concept to all the fabs. If a process worked in one fab, it would work identically in another fab - equipment, processes, specifications, procedures were all uniform from fab to fab (for the same process). He and his people worked closely with the equipment vendors to increase the uptime and availability of equipment, reduce particle/defect generation from these pieces of equipment, etc., resulting in incredible yield improvement. From the depths of 1985 and a loss of about $194 million, Barrett streamlined manufacturing and development (Gerry Parker actually was in charge of the development side, and now runs all the fabs as well) to today's position as the envy of the entire semiconductor world. All these years when Andy Grove has been seen as the leader - and rightfully so - Barrett has been a field marshal working quietly within Intel constantly improving the fab and development processes. Barrett already has the support of the "organization" - he had major role in CREATING it. His contribution to Intel's success parallels that of Andy Grove. Paul