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spokeshave

03/20/03 11:03 AM

#1211 RE: Elmer Phud #1208

Elmer: As others have pointed out before, your claims about F30 production utilization are flawed. Let me try to explain.

First off, you appear to be using a defect density of 0.25/cm2 for all production. This is a naive assumption. As you stated, that defect density is considered excellent yield. However, what you don't consider is that there are several concurrent production processes at any time at F30 each of which is in a different state of maturity. As with most production processes, yields start off lower and increase as the process matures, yet you are assigning a mature yield figure to all processes. I am certain that the overall weighted average yield for the fab is quite a bit lower than the figure you use. It is completely unreasonable to assume that all concurrent processes are producing excellent yields.

Second, at any given time, some process are ramping up, others are winding down, and others are preparing for production.

Each of these affects capacity to some unquantifiable degree. You tend to spin the numbers in a way that makes it appear that half of the fab is collecting dust. However, if some reasonable assumptions are made for the impact of the above, it is a simple matter to calculate that the fab is running at near capacity. For that matter, one can calculate utilization for any number of reasonable scenarios and come up with anywhere from 25% to 150% utilization. You seem to be fixated on 50%, but that position makes no sense from a business perspective. I suspect that the number is closer to about 80%, and that it varies significantly as processes begin, mature and end.But that's my guess, and it is every bit as good as yours. I can certainly come up with a product mix and yield scenario that would be reasonable and support my guess.

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sgolds

03/20/03 12:28 PM

#1214 RE: Elmer Phud #1208

On 50% utililization (Fab 30) -

The theoretical output of Fab 30, which I've seen calculated many times now, does not take into account the realities of supplying several products, current and future, from a single fab. To be fair, the unrealistic numbers were promoted by AMD fans as the fab was being built, and AMD management did nothing to discourage such talk - actually, they encouraged it when Jerry claimed AMD would supply 30% of the CPU market with Athlon.

Now for a dose of reality: This fab is not producing a single product on all lines. At any one time there are lines being taken down for conversion, lines used for transition from engineering to manufacturing, and lines upgraded for finer geometries.

The parts of Fab 30 which aren't being used for production right now include lines that are being converted away from Palamino and TBred-A. TBred-B lines should be coming down by now. Also toss in lines being used to model SOI technology purchased from IBM. Now set aside a bunch of lines for .09 preparation and testing. Lines in production for Hammer include building Opteron inventory, none of which are booked until April.

Fab 30 has generally been around 50% utilization for shipping product for these reasons. The other 50% is busy preparing the future.