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

To: Yousef who wrote (33589)	6/27/1998 10:17:00 PM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583335

Yousef: <<This just proves the old saying, Maxwell ... "Garbage In, Garbage Out" Your assumption on silicon cost is garbage ... cost is closer to $10 - $12. >> Give me a break buddy. You must be live in the caveman period. Intel's 0.25um process requires the latest and newest tools. For example your new stepper costs in the order of $6M which has to be paid for. There are other costs that are associated as well. For example Intel has to pay a PhD guy like you $60K-$100K/yr to develop the 0.25um process and beyond. At Intel there are a bunch of you guys and they don't work for free. In Taiwan like at TSMC they hardly do any development. They get processes from companies that ask them to do foundry for them. Their fabs are like a "sweat shops". They are able to achieve the lowest $ cost/silicon area. Another factor is that the logic such as the PII is much more complicate than the stuffs that they make at TSMC (more metals, more processing, tighter CDs, etc.). Thus the cycle time is longer and the output is much lower. A megafab in Taiwan can pump out as much as 10,000 wafers/week! There is no way they can produce such rate with PII. If Intel wants to achieve $10-$12 per die then they need to get rid of their army of PhDs like you. <<I'll also let you in on another secret ... TSMC is in "big trouble".>> Let me give you my secret... The whole semiconductor is in big trouble not just TSMC. Maxwell