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To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (678)	7/17/1998 10:27:00 AM
From: Joseph J. Valenzuela	Respond to of 810

EBN's Daily News Digest Will The Millennium Bug Halt Chip Lines (7:50 p.m. EDT, 7/16/98) There could be a chip shortage-maybe a big one-starting Jan. 1, 2000. That's when semiconductor fab lines across the world could start doing funny things because of the millennium bug. As pointed out in an earlier column, OEMs and chip makers face a potential Year 2000 glitch in the embedded code of millions of microcontrollers. And at the Semicon West show last week, industry executives revealed another major concern: that Y2K errors can cause equipment to shut down, run erratically and otherwise foul up production lines. That could bring the chip industry's long-sought end to oversupply, but not the way they intended. If fabs are affected by the Y2K gremlins, it could shake up the chip market, literally overnight-at the stroke of twelve. As with the microcontroller Y2K threat, no one really knows the dimensions of the problem. Sematech has developed a software package to check nineteen of the most likely Y2K time bombs ticking away in equipment code. Consortium officials said more than 90% of the equipment failed in initial Y2K testing. To be fair, that included many minor glitches that could easily be remedied. But it also revealed that many tools shut down, others wouldn't turn off, and still more continued running but produced erroneous results or data. A fab line tool can be Year-2000 compliant, but fail when bad data is fed into the machine from external sources. Since a fab is a highly complex, integrated web of equipment and software, the potential for Y2K errors is frightening. Chip makers and tool suppliers vary all over the lot in how well they are moving to fix the Y2K bugs. Texas Instruments and IBM get high marks for tackling the millennium problem early, but even these companies are pressing their tool suppliers to work more closely with them to find and defuse the Y2K mines. OEMs have a huge vested interest in helping the chip industry fix its Year 2000 problems. The more elite OEMs have already headed off the Y2K crisis in their own corporate computer systems or in IT products they sell into the market. They should move quickly to share that Y2K expertise with their chip suppliers to help ensure uninterrupted supply. President Clinton last week proposed legislation to exempt such industry Y2K collaboration from antitrust and liability laws. That's a helpful step, but the Year 2000 fix mainly involves a massive time-consuming review of every piece of software code, and an equally laborious task of writing and implementing fixes. All this costs hundreds of billions of dollars in the total global Y2K software sweep-for which companies can't bill a nickel of revenue. That puts an added strain on the chip industry at a time when earnings are awful, and when companies are hard pressed for R&D and capital resources. It would be ironic if the Semiconductor Industry Association's National Technology Roadmap was brought to a crashing halt by two little digits of obsolete code. URL: pubs.cmpnet.com