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

To: kash johal who wrote (37018)	9/14/1998 11:01:00 AM
From: Maxwell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1570548

<<What do you think of the technology vs Intels?>> SOI is the most bang for the bucks. SOI will reduces the Miller capacitance by as much as 50%. Thus you can get an increase in frequency as much as 50% and reduction in power as much as 30%. The disadvantage is that it takes a long time to prepare the wafers. IBM uses heavy oxygen implant to prepare their wafers. The time to make 20 wafers can take as long as 2 days before the wafers can be available for processing. The other advantage is that SOI will make your transistors have a "floating ground" since the substrate is insulated from your transistors. A combination of SOI and copper will be the ultimate feast. All I can say is that Intel is not the leader in any of these areas. Maxwell

To: kash johal who wrote (37018)	9/14/1998 11:34:00 AM
From: Pravin Kamdar	Respond to of 1570548

Kash, What do you think of the technology vs Intels. Do you mean versus IBM? I suspect they are very similar. I don't believe Intel has announced an SOI process, yet, but I'm sure they are working on one. IBM makes their own SOI wafers, since they couldn't get a supplier to make what they needed. Samsung didn't say if they are making their own wafers. I suspect that once the demand for SOI wafers gets stronger, the wafer companies will start to produce quality SOI wafers that others, like NSM and AMD, can use to more easily enter the SOI market. Cyrix could sure use SOI to keep the pwoer down on the MXi and the MediaPC. Source and drain junction leakage can be greatly reduced using SOI. I think the biggest implication of the Samsung announcement is that it another blow to Merced in it's performance race against the Alpha. But, by the time the Merced is released, Intel just might have SOI and copper. Remember that they announced adding cache to the Celeron long after AMD announce the Sharptooth, but they delivered it long before. In the near term (one year) it is great news for Compaq. And, in a round about way (through Compaq and the links between Alpha and the K7), it could be good for AMD. AMD should license the Samsung SOI process for use in Dresden. They may have to in order to get the K7 to 1 GHz by 2000. Pravin.