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To: FJB who wrote (1689)	6/23/1998 11:34:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 2946

Here's hoping Papken and the whole sales team have already paid a visit to Steve Appleton and have delivered a MicraScan III for evaluation purposes... Micron plans for higher productivity at newly acquired TI fabs By Jack Robertson BOISE, Idaho -- Micron Technology Inc. intends to leapfrog from 0.30-and 0.35-micron processing directly to 0.21-micron wafers at the former Texas Instruments DRAM fabs involved in the pending $800 million acquisition of TI's DRAM operations, Micron's chairman, Steve Appleton, said in an interview today. He told Semiconductor Business News that as soon as the deal is completed in September, Micron will start installing deep-ultraviolet (DUV) processing at the TI fab at Avessano, Italy, and at the joint-venture fabs that TI divested: with Kobe Steel in Japan and with Hewlett-Packard and Canon Inc. in Singapore. He said he expected the upgrade conversions to take about a year. "That will bring the fabs we get from TI to the same productivity level as Micron's Boise fabs," Appleton explained. "It will sharply increase the output of DRAMs [from the die shrinks], giving Micron an overwhelming cost advantage in the highly competitive DRAM market." Appleton said the potential for die-shrink productivity increases was great at the TI-related fabs, "because right now TI has more wafer starts per month than Micron does. We just get far more die per wafer. Once we upgrade the TI fabs with Micron manufacturing technology, we can get the same high level of die and increase production significantly without adding any capacity." The Micron executive said no decision has been made yet on the DUV lithography vendor for the TI fab upgrading. In Boise, Micron is installing deep-UV steppers from ASM Lithography, with the goal of producing 85% of all wafers there on the 248-nanometer excimer laser lines by the end of the year. By contrast, TI has relied almost solely on Canon as its lithography vendor for DRAM fabs. Appleton said Micron will carefully study the mix of equipment at the new TI DRAM facilities before selecting the DUV tools to be installed.