Posted on Monday, December 10 2012 @ 13:37 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed at a Sandford Bernstein technology conference that he expects that the upcoming transition to 450mm wafer manufacturing will terminate half of the number of semiconductor design and production companies. Otellini claims the industry will change dramatically over the next four or five years, and he's confident that Intel will be on the viable side.
“I do think there are a number of transitions coming up in this decade. We’ve got transition to 450mm [wafers] at some point; we’ve got a transition to EUV at some point. Both are going to be expensive and are going to require scale. In general, every time there has been a wafer-size change in the industry, only half of [design and production] market players [survived],” said Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, at Sanford Bernstein technology conference.
The reason why the head of Intel is so optimistic about the success of the transition to 450mm and EUV manufacturing is clear and simple: the company has been on the development forefront of both technologies. Moreover, this year Intel invested into ASML, a leading maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. As a result of getting a stake in ASML, Intel gets almost full control of the transition to 450mm wafers and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.
Source: X-bit Labs
