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To: Paul Engel who wrote (60989)	7/22/1998 9:29:00 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dr Engel, this copper development is interesting, do you believe there is a long term advantage toward processors being based on copper? I would imagine it would be quite a bit more expensive to produce, but that is just a wild guess. Since the speed advantages seem non existent. Why move the chips to this format? Are they looking down the road at Laptop heat dissipation perhaps? This inquiring student aid (who reports very good results from the last exam) would be interested to know. :-) Michael

To: Paul Engel who wrote (60989)	7/23/1998 12:44:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Adam - re: "several months ago IBM demonstrated a 1.1 Ghz PowerPC technology. It was based on copper, " Several months ago at the ISSCC, IBM demonstrated two chips. One was a 1.1 Ghz integer processor with "only " 1 million transistors. It was fabricated with ALL ALUMINUM Interconnect. The second processor they demoed - and gave a paper on - was a PowerPC made with 6 layers of copper and an Leff of 0.12 microns - probably a 0.18 micron Drawn CD - as well as local interconnect. That PowerPC had a TOP SPEED of only 480 MHz. Paul Ah, I see where the confusion arose - two PPCs demoed. My mistake. That explains why the fastest copper G3s we'll see in the near term are ~400Mhz. However, the point is that AMD promising 1Ghz in 2000 doesn't seem impressive when you realize that is on everyone's roadmap (Alpha, PPC, Intel, etc) for 2000. - Adam