UMC, the Taiwanese foundry, expects to be at 100 percent capacity this quarter, which represents, according to CEO Jackson Hu, an opportunity for UMC to increase its prices.

In Q4, we had 96 percent capacity utilization," Hu told the Globalpress Electronics Summit 2004 in this week. "We anticipate that for Q1 it will be 100 percent with all the fabs fully loaded."

Asked what effect this would have on UMC's pricing strategy, Hu replied: "It is a perfect time to raise prices."

UMC's only opportunity to increase capacity this year is in the ramp of its newest 12inch fab which is currently running 9,000 wafers a month and is projected to be on 30,000 by the end of the year.
UMC has been producing production-qualified ICs on 90nm since mid-2003. It has taken one year running wafers through the fab to get to fully data-sheet compatible production qualified chips.

Asked if he thought that further generations -- 65nm and 45nm -- would be more or less difficult to implement than 90nm, Hu replied: "65nm will be more difficult than 90nm, and 45nm will be more difficult than 65nm."

As Hu's first production customer for 90nm, Xilinx's CEO Wim Roelandts agreed: "90nm is going to be the last one of the relatively easy generations. 65nm will require a new high-k material for metal gate and introducing new materials is always tough."

The benefits that the companies expect to get from 90nm as compared with 130nm are, in the case of Xilinx, "1 million system gates for $12," said Roelandts.

For Altera, which has re-designed its product to cope with the increased threshold leakage of 90nm processes, the benefits are: "50 per cent increase in performance, a 2.25 times increase in density, pricing which will be half the cost per logic element than at 0.13micron and power consumption which is higher because of the leakage current," said Altera's CEO John Daane.

For the first time in the industry's history, it seems, a new technology node has not resulted in the automatic benefit of delivering lower power.

By: DocMemory
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