Hard to explain, unless you have lived it...
So what is so special about the intel "copy exactly!"?
In the old days, before CE!, they would transfer a process from one factory to another. The other factory would have the same equipment as the first, and for some reason they could still not get the products to yield. I know of one case where it came down to the length of a plumbing run to one piece of equipment. The difference in length was enough to change the equipment output sufficiently to cause poor yields.
Now you are talking about the difference of 300mm wafers vs. 200mm which in and of itself is a huge difference. Maintaining the uniformity of material across the larger wafer is going to be much more difficult. Today, it is typical that the edge of the wafer has different characteristics than the center. You can imagine this effect is significantly magnified with the larger wafers. We know this problem is solvable, they just need to implement the right stuff.
The real killer is that the time from a wafer started to results is over 4 months... it takes that long to know if you have something like a plumbing line that might be too long. Of course once you know you have a problem you have to figure out what it is and how to fix it... then rerun the whole thing which takes another 4 months. The problem may not be that hard, and it probably does not take the best and the brightest process engineers to get the job done... but it will take time.
--Alan
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