450-mm: The best bargain we've ever had

Dan Hutcheson, EETimes
2/9/2011 6:04 PM EST

450-mm: I call it a bargain, the best we ever had. It’s been six years since I wrote my popular treatise on 450-mm. Back then I showed that if the industry followed the 300-mm trend, it would take more than $100 billion to develop 450-mm—that was for just the equipment industry and that was the best case. The worst case was wafermageddon: $1 trillion. It was clear that the industry had to do a much better job of things.

When it came to 450-mm, there were two industry sides. One believed that the cost escalation trend that came with 300-mm was inevitable and would break the industry at 450-mm. The other believed it was essential to keeping the industry on Moore’s Law. I fell on the middle divide, believing that a large part of what had been spent with 300-mm was wasted on false starts, unrealistic expectations, irrational exuberance and bad business models, to name a few.

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