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To: gnuman who wrote (51936)	4/2/1998 2:44:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Gene, re: Quality, Yields, Reliability and Cost I think you three have covered it pretty well. Yes, low yielding processes are bad and expensive. Low yields are usually related to some critical fabrication that is out of control. It may be metal shorts, opens or delamination. It might be source/drain shorts, or thin oxide defects. Whatever is killing the yield in the parts found bad is also present in the parts found good to some degree. This is lousy quality. But low quality does not automatically mean low reliability. AMD can ship reliable parts with proper screening. How? - it's called burn in. With low quality material manufacturers must place the parts in elevated temperature ovens while operating for some period of time, hours to weeks depending on the failure rate. This step will eliminate most of the weak units. The remainder are likely to work just fine. The problem is that 100% burn-in is expensive, time consuming, and a production bottleneck. Burn-in circuit boards and ovens are horrendously expensive. They take a long time to manufacture. The process adds weeks to the production flow with expensive inventory tied up in the ovens. Finally the ship rate is limited by the throughput of the ovens. I would easily guess that burn-in is now a major limiter to AMD's ability to ship K6. So could AMD just wave a hand and "ship it". There is no reputation to protect, right? Well, it is the job of Compaq and IBM to insist on proper burn-in less they be stuck with replacing failures in the field and losing their own money and reputation. This is how AMD can sell to the big boys, and another reason that AMD is losing big money on every chip. Jeff