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To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (36480)	7/24/1998 7:29:00 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 53903

teri, absolutely. the ONLY way to reduce cost is to increase capacity. decreasing capacity sends costs through the roof. that is why everyone is stabbing themselves and losing $100s of millions every q. even if dram goes up, pc sales will go down as the only growth driver is reduced prices. the boxmakers stop reducing prices and sales tank which mean that demand for dram tanks which means - same old same old. what i don't understand is how so many can be so clueless. good luck.

To: Teri Skogerboe who wrote (36480)	7/24/1998 7:53:00 PM
From: Ed Beers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 53903

>I guess the short version of my question is this: when MU changes their equipment over to the smaller line widths, say goes from .35 to .25 or to .21, does this move, in and of itself, increase MU's (or any DRAM maker's) capacity? Do they get more chips per wafer once the shrink is completed? Teri, < In gross terms .352/.212 = 2.8 so you get almost 3 times as many chips per wafer. As they transition from 16 Mbit to 64 Mbit parts, there is an improvement in bit density of about 4/3 due to less overhead. Ignoring yield (in the real world you never ignore yield), they will get about three and a half times as many bits on the same wafer. Virtually all cost reductions are a result of producing more bits per wafer so any reduction in unit costs comes with an increase in capacity since the number of wafers processed is essentially fixed.