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To: Eric Yang who wrote (61754)	8/4/1998 2:26:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Respond to of 186894

Eric, re:"The whole point of IBM's announcement yesterday was that it has developed ways to solve these problems." Thank you for the article links. Some were informative - some were pure hype. Yes - I do believe in reading the detail behind all tech announcements and applaud the IBM researchers that have apparently advanced the art of oxide isolation. I love this industry for always exploiting ways to do things better... IBM has quite a reputations for great lab work. They have not been known as doing a very good job getting these advances into mainstream production. Perhaps these last two media forays indicate that there is a new religion at IBM to become more innovative. I hope so as I am a fan of innovation. I remain very skeptical that this SOI will pan out. As I said Intel is fully familiar with these techniques as well as many other opportunities to reduce device parasitic capacitances. The press misses the fact that techniques usually have as many shortcomings as advantages. As always there are tradeoffs. Intel has done a great job at making technical tradeoffs. Craig Barrett has lead the development of a world class manufacturing machine. Given Intel's R & D spending level I have faith (and some knowledge) that Intel will continue to excel for the next few generations. Jeff

To: Eric Yang who wrote (61754)	8/6/1998 9:20:00 PM
From: Pullin-GS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

You guys are so close minded it is pathetic. Yes, SOI (silicon on insulator) and SOS (silicon on sapphire) have been around for over 2 decades. While there are many technical advantages, technical barriers made it cost prohibitive for general mass production application. I know of a company who has been doing it for almost 2 years....they have been doing it profitably (read no losses), along with efficient and cost productive (proprietary) mass-manufacturing of GaAs wafers as well. Current orders include high-output displays/LEDS (including auto tailights), space-grade solar cells, and fast communication ASICs, as well as communications substrate chips. In recent years, semiconductor device manufacturers have increasingly utilized substrates other than silicon to improve the performance of semiconductor devices or to enable new applications that could not be supported on the current silicon technolgies. These alternative substrates are composed of a single element such as Ge, or multiple elements which may include, among others, gallium, aluminum, indium, arsenic, phosphorus and nitrogen. Substrates that consist of more than one element are referred to as "compound substrates" and include GaAs (we all will grow tired of hearing about GaAs in the next few years IMO...it will dominate performance electronics), InP, GaP and GaN. GaAs is currently the most widely used compound substrate. Compound substrates have electrical properties which allow semiconductor devices to operate at much higher speeds than silicon-based devices or at the same speed with lower power consumption. Compound substrates also have better opto-electronic characteristics than silicon which enable them to convert energy into light and lasers, or to detect light and convert light into electrical energy. Pull your head out of the sand Pretty bold statement for a Mac-User/investor. ;-) Regards....