Question-and-Answer Session
Unidentified Analyst
[Inaudible] trend among some of the big money makers to move away from that and kind of get back in to the adding capacity in smaller increments? It seems that maybe amongst some of the biggest memory makers that they’re maybe changing how they might spend money and they might actually move away from the mega-fab concept. Do you think that’s actually happening? And if so, why?
Thomas Caulfield Ph.D.
I don’t know if they’re getting away from the mega-fab in fact, I believe they are going more there. But, you are right, they’re trying to put smaller increments in capacity on so they don’t out strip capacity to demand. But, the fact of the matter is they may put a little bit more modularized capacity doesn’t mean they’re not going to get to the full scale, highly used fixed cost mega-fab to take cost out ultimately. I think those are two different things. I think the mega-fab is still there, modulating capacity to meet the demand and not out strip the demand is just how you fill that mega-fab out.
Timothy M. Archer
Just to add to Tom’s comments, I think the concept of a mega-fab is one where you’re trying to maximize the wafer output per month. We see fabs today, we see one very large fab in Korea that frankly when I visited I was actually blown away, 200 meters long, 80 meters wide and the output of this fab is scheduled to be 300,000 300 millimeter wafers per month. I mean, that’s incredible and its two floors, two separate floors, 150,000 each floor exactly duplicated. It’s trying to leverage that infrastructure and be able to cram as much in the space as you possibly can. It’s absolutely overwhelming. But, they’re not going to fill it in one foul swoop. It’s about $8 billion of equipment to fill it.
Unidentified Analyst
Well, just on that point, do you think as you [inaudible] move to adding supply in a little bit smaller increments? Do you think that there’s a period of maybe six months or even nine months where there’s some sort of rationalization of the growth rate of the industry, of the order expectations as you don’t have one or two big customers placing big huge orders that kind of holds things up every single quarter and then you kind of get back on this same cadence where you have foundries ordering a little bit every quarter and over the longer term that has implications of kind of how fast the industry grows.
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