from increases in wafer size, such that there clearly must be a point where the per-chip cost-reduction fails to justify the increase in fab expenses.

On the other hand, sometimes corporations push change not because it lowers their own costs but because it inconveniences competitors.

- bill

The change from 8" to 12" did help with yields because the number of dies wasted at the curved edge went down proportionately.

With todays smaller dies and the relatively smaller portion of them ruined by the curved edge, the cost and logistics of everyone changing their machines and wafers it just doesn't pay for itself.

I've seen explnations of chip making that range from diverting rivers of riverwater to building 1/4 square mile buildings.

Bah, you expose stuff & stick it in tray. Well, PcB, at least. Yet I believe each wafer is brought up from photo masks & reduced like concave lens to sub minature.

Very sub, if you don't remember much of NM quote is dispersed vapour from metalic bead vaporized in wafers vacumn chamber, resultant coating which musta be very thin indeed is transistors active charge/state charge as ohms.

Well great, so if each chip actually does get much smaller & why not, means average work up will be for many more units & lets face it, How many people need one million desktop cpu chip?

Maybe quality is getting worth extra effort. Or Intels designs' are going more & more Telcom (Very large production needed of specific units). The AMD is Turning RED.

thomas stewart von drashek

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