Replies to post #703 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[SemiconEng]

AMD's Dresden fab is reason for delays
From the Inquirer, so take it with a grain of salt:
AMD's Dresden fab is reason for delays
Trouble at the chip mill

I remember when I was working on a Process that was trying to sqeeze every last little bit of performance out of a design on an old process, because the New One wasn't ready.

We had to limit ourselves to the 1 Best performing Litho Stepper, and even then, Etch was meeting with Litho twice per day to review the Steppers Focus/Exposure data vs. the Post Etch "Critical Dimension Data", to retarget the Stepper. It was a Huge amount of labor and tool downtime, and even then, the Bin-1 (Highest Speed) Yields were..... less than desireable.

Pure speculation of course, but I wonder if the same thing is happening at AMD?

Semi

[wbmw]

Greg, I don't think it's quite fair to pin Dresden for the delay problems, simply because there have been long delays there in the past. Although the hidden point here is that having only one fab is limiting if ever a serious problem does occur, as does any situation where one puts all their eggs in one basket. One of the benefits of Intel is that they have multiple fabs, and the opportunity to use other resources if one set of resources has a problem. AMD doesn't have this luxury, so if Dresden is a problem for them, there is little they can do in terms of development until they solve the problems at hand.

wbmw