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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Petz who wrote (31422)	4/8/1998 12:03:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571873

Petz - re: "What percentage of wafers are discarded before all production steps are completed? " Good question! The number you are asking for is generally known as the "line yield" - the fraction of wafers completed divided by the wafers started. These days, 95% is a minimum with 97 or 98% typical. Wafers are more rugged than they used to be - edge rounding was introduced perhaps 18 year ago and greatly reduced the breakage of wafers during processing. More recently, wafers are rarely handled by fab operators - most of the equipment loading is done with robotics and/or dedicated mechanical loaders. Wafer transport is also done via robotics - Intel uses PRIA and I think AMD uses Daifuku systems. Equipment performance has improved dramatically as well which has minimized the mis-processing of wafers due to equipment malfunctions. Paul