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

To: Time Traveler who wrote (33604)	6/28/1998 8:52:00 AM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583478

Trime Traveller: <<Maxwell, your figure of a PhD's salary at $60K - $100K per year, which Time Traveler assumes not to include bonuses, is rather low, don't you think? Unless Intel is running their PhDs like in a sweat shop...>> Starting PhD fresh out of school at Intel in Santa Clara for a process engineering position is about $65K-$70K/yr. There is no signing bonus because they are considered college grad. This salary is very competitive. If they go to Oregon or New Mexico then the salary is a few K less due to lower standard of living. They also get stock option which costs the company almost noting. The stock option is given at the price when they work and if the stock goes up they make money. They also get semi-annual profit sharing and this is big at Intel. For an experienced process engineer, the salary goes up depend on how good that person is. The cap is about $100K for a process engineer unless you are really good, with lots of patents and considered an industry leader. Managers still make more money. <<This company TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Company) gets mentioned quite ofton. Does it have clean rooms capable of producing ICs with die size as big as K6 or P-II?>> TSMC is the leader in foundry. They have many 8" megafabs. Some of their megafab can do as much as 10,000 wafers/week. They just recently built a mega fab in Oregon called WaferTech. TSMC makes everything from DVD, logic, ASIC, memory, etc. They just recently moved their production to 0.25um with 4 metal layer capability. <<Not all semiconductor companies are in trouble, just look as VTSS for example.>> VTSS is in a nich market of making GaAs. There are very little competition. Their business depends on sales of cellular phones and other high speed device applications. Maxwell