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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (21932)	7/17/1998 7:16:00 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Karun, the Y2K problem may not affect the fabs directly in Korea, Taiwan or Japan. Since Asia had been pre-occupied with their economic woes, valuable time has been lost. What if their problem is power supply, water, parts that can't be delivered, transportation in chaos etc? The chip makers probably won't be too interested in buying any equipment until problems out of their control are solved. Ramsey

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (21932)	7/17/1998 11:47:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Respond to of 70976

It costs $1.5 billion plus to build a fab. One can rip out every controller and line of software in the place and replace it for less than that. Y2K is, IMO, EXTREMELY unlikely to spark massive tool purchases. It may, however, spark massive expenditures by equipment and especially control software companies to get into compliance, most of which can't be passed along to customers. I don't think even that is terribly likely, though. Most tools had only very minimal software until recently (last 5-10 years). Code that new should be compliant. IMO, the biggest exposure is probably the factory control and enterprise software, which generally dates back much further. Katherine