Tech Watch: Intel doubles the fun in roadmap change

By Tom Foremski - October 15, 2004

Joe Fay, US Editor at Computerwire has penned an interesting analysis of the changes in Intel’s microprocessor roadmap. He asks how Intel will produce chips twice as large and sell them for about the same price as current products?


These forthcoming dual core microprocessors are large chips yet Intel says it will sell them at similar price points to its single core microprocessors.

It’s going to be an interesting challenge for Intel. I’ve covered this company for more than twenty years, and they have become a chip manufacturing powerhouse—accelerating down the Moore’s Law highway ahead of almost everyone(IBM is up there with them).

The way Intel will deal with such a challenge is the way it always does--with its core competency: manufacturing. It will open up the faucet on its 300mm production lines and push toward smaller geometries. The use of larger wafers and smaller geometries should allow Intel to reduce production costs faster than the growth in the size of their chips.

There is a lot of drama here.

Can Intel make the jump to the next shrink of chip geometries?

Will it be tripped up with a design issue as these chips become so huge and complex?

Can it maintain yield levels, since larger chips are more prone to contamination and the dustbin?

On that last one Intel should be fine. The new 300mm factories are a lot cleaner than the older generation of fabs, because they got rid of the main contaminant—people.

The bunny suits and gloves and goggles that semiconductor workers wear are not to protect the person. The bunny suits are there to protect the chips.

Even in bunny suits and goggles, people shed huge numbers of microscopic particles, and just one can spoil a chip—it will block out part of the wiring. The new 300mm wafer fabs, dinner-plate sized silicon disks, are processed in canisters that are too heavy to be carried by people from one process step to another.

The latest generation of chip fabs are more highly automated than ever, to limit exposure to humans. With fewer people working the fabs, I wonder why some communities try to lure large chip makers to build fabs in their region, with large tax incentives and other material benefits.

A local job boom from such ventures would seem to be short-lived and shrinking over the long term--along with the die shrinks.



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By Tom Foremski - October 15, 2004 | Permalink | Category: Tech Watch
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