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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (29836)	4/29/1999 10:46:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 70976

Not sure I follow this. The ASP for a 64 Mb chip should be higher than for a 16Mb chip. Not 4x higher, but higher. Which is dropping, cost per chip (problem), or cost per megabyte (normal)? 1. I was ignoring ASPs as mainly irrelevant to the specific topic. 2. DRAM production is well into the migration to 64Mb chips. 128 Mb chips are now ramping up. Soon we'll start seeing the 256Mb chips. That's fewer chips per MB of memory anywhere from 1/4 to 1/16th. Therefore, larger arrays take longer to test. I don't know if it's one-for-one, though: Neither do I. But I would suspect that the total cycle time for testing chips including setup, testing, removal, [repeat 4 to 16 times] would be substantially reduced as bit density increases on a per Megabyte basis. In any case, my only point was even though I tend to hold little regard for analysts generally, I wouldn't discard the Soundview analysis out of hand. It's worthy of some consideration. Then feel free to dismiss it out of hand. ... or whatever. Ian.