Applied says move to 12-inch wafers slow

APPLIED MATERIALS turned in a small loss yesterday for its quarter and warned that things weren't getting any better any time soon.

The loss it made is because it included costs of restructuring which has forced it to lay off more people.

Applied makes equipment used by semiconductor companies to make (fabricate) chips.

In particular, the chief financial officer, Joseph Bronson, said that while there are orders in the offing for 12-inch, or 300 millimeter wafers, the move to that size was slow.

Intel is not wasting much time moving to 300 millimeter wafers from the eight inch silicon wafers most of its factories use, and there's a very good reason for this.

An eight inch fab and a 12-inch fab are quite similar in cost but the advantages for a firm like Intel are clear.

The bigger the silicon wafer, the more dies, or chips, you get. This is called yield. A 12-inch fab yields as much as over two times the semiconductors manufacturers can make with an eight inch factory.

And that means more chips from less factories.

There's more information on this at the Intel site. µ