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Technology Stocks : MEMC INT'L. (WFR -NYSE) The Sleeping Giant? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael McKnight who wrote (4240)	3/1/1999 8:15:00 PM
From: Andrew Vance	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4697

Interesting comments but that would mean Texas Instruments is a low quality producer of ICs since they sold WFR their Sherman Texas Wafer plant to manage. This plant was one of the reason for going public in the first place. As far as INTC is concerned, just because they are perceived as the head honcho in smiconductors due to their over priced microprocessors, does not mean they are the end all when it comes to equipment or materials.<GG> There was very little creativity at INTC when I was there, from a manufacturing perspective. True, it is in the process of changing, but for the longest time INTC was a "cookie cutter fab" environment. You were told how to build your fab, what equipement to purchase, how to set up the process, what data to take, etc. The concept of "continuous process improvement" was the sole domain of the specialized corporate R&D/ Development groups. It was my experience that INTC was always arrogant (but I did love my stock options over the years) and could do as they pleased. You always had to kiss their butts when dealing with them. money was usually no object to them since they could pass it along to the end customer. They would buy Mercedes (pun intended<G>) when a Buick would do.<GGG> Now that competition is popping up finally, they are getting more cost conscious and competitive. They have ven backed off from the hard fast "We only hire college grads frsh out of school so we can train them the INTC way."<GGG>. Anyway, if WFR sucks (and I am willing to admit my mistakes if/when they happen), what are the top 2 providers in your opinion? Also, if you wouldn't mind, I would be very interested from a technical perspective, what the issues were you encountered. I still have contacts (close friends) working across the industry. Most of them are able to take the time to qualify new vendors if they uncover quality issues. A good deal of effort has been made over the years to use the best quality materials and most of us have been richly rewarded (bonuses, promtions, etc.) as a result of implementing new materials, equipment, processes, and anything else that improves yield and quality. Who knows, your information might help a friend of mine earn another set of kudos.<GGG> Finally, while I have not disagreed with you so far<GGG>, I do have one point of contention. Back in my previous incarnation, we took 12 product lots of wafers with 50 wafers per lot (600 wafers total), which had 200 wafers from each silcion vendor intermixed amongst the 12 lots randomly (with 16 or 17 wafers per vendor in each lot) and manufactured a given high volume device with these wafers. This was done over the course of a month. This simple test (not even a traditional Design of Experiments or Taguichi set of experiments) then had yields compared against each other within the lot and from lot to lot to determine if there were any yield differences. These wafers were subsequently followed up with reliability testing for post test fallout. This is how we determined if there was a yield impact from the wafer vendor level. This was followed up by more testing on various devices across the product portfolio to see if there were product issues. This was just a cursory set of tests and did not involve flatness, resistivity, thickness, etc testing, which is done by the Quality Assurance Groups. So, even with all the other process variability, we can do proper experiementation to determine what affects yields. We might not know exactly what it was that caused the yield disparities but we can track it down to a commodity, process tool, etc. and work from there. Then the real work begins to figure out what the actual cause was down to the "molecular level" <GG>. We really didn't care about that detail since all we were doing was chasing 1-2% yield increase prospects. Andrew