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

To: Yousef who wrote (34693)	7/17/1998 6:58:00 PM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572616

Yousef: <<Maxwell, please "grow up" ... act like an "adult".>> It is you who started first calling me "process ignorant" without premises. <<Copper damascene processing will not significantly improve the speed of processors in .25um or .18um technologies. It is primarily HYPE to get new customers for IBM, others ... The reason is that Copper thickness control is much, much worse than Aluminum technology. This is due to control issues from the trench etch and "dishing" during polish ... thus thickness control and resistivity specs are much wider than for Aluminum (dep/etch). Designers must use the worse case resistivity specs when modeling and simulating designs ... in fact the resistivity specs need to be so wide for Copper that they overlap the much tighter Aluminum specs. Thus there is little gain in "effective" resistivity going to Copper.>> Looks like it is you that have never worked with copper process before. Your knowledge from articles are old. There has been much progress since those articles which you read. Most of those problems have been solved. At Motorola, not only yield is great they are using in PRODUCTION MAKING REAL PRODUCTS! Your points on copper being able to boost speed is a mute point. You have completely ignored my statement that copper REDUCES 40% of backend process. This means the cycle time is short and AMD will be able to PUMP OUT more chips cheaper. Electromigration is another advantage. It is a very good deal for AMD. AMD would rather TRADE technology than reinventing the wheel. AMD would get the copper technology and the 0.18um transistor technology. In 6 months AMD should be able to copy those process and implement them in K6/K7 products. MOT is already doing production on 0.18um. You on the other hand still have work to do to work out the lithography on Intel 0.18um process. Without local interconnect on 0.18um, I am beginning to laugh at Intel process. Maxwell