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

To: blake_paterson who wrote (25134)	10/9/1998 3:35:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

From the process point of view, chips are chips, pretty much. A RISC processor doesn't require significantly different processing from a conventional microcontroller, given the same die size. A shift away from PCs isn't going to mean a major shift in the type of process tools being purchased, or the number of tools needed to meet a particular capacity goal. Now, a shift away from PCs would change the mix of chips being manufactured, and might increase the fraction of high-end chips, like systems-on-a-chip, vs commodity chips, like DRAMs. High end chips are driving the fabrication technology right now, so larger market share for them might drive it faster. However, the SIA members involved in writing the current Roadmap are mostly high-end chip companies, so the Roadmap reflects this trend already. Most of the semiconductor market forecasts I've seen take at least some of this trend into account. The growth of telecommunications chips, for example, is definitely considered in current forecasts. And, on the other other hand, semi equipment market projections are infamous for being wildly inaccurate anyway, in both the positive and negative direction. Even if the published assumptions do include these factors, that doesn't mean the forecast is accurate. So I guess the short answer is that the overall rate of retooling won't likely change significantly, but you might see some individual chip companies make larger or smaller investments than they otherwise would. Katherine