Hold On to Your Copper Stocks.

ZDNET news desk ^ | 10/1/01 | Michael Kanellos

[janus]

Copper a perfect fit for speedy chips

By Michael Kanellos

Special to ZDNet......... October 1, 2001 5:52 AM PT

The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a massive technological change, converting to mass-producing chips with copper, rather than aluminum, wires. The weird part: Almost no one seems to be having major problems.

Copper, which conducts electricity better than aluminum, gives designers an avenue to break through looming physical barriers that could prevent further boosts in chip performance.

The first copper Pentium 4's will come out in the fourth quarter of this year at 2.2GHz, for instance, and hit 3.5GHz next year.

Working with copper poses several challenges, however. "Sputtering," a process for applying metal to silicon, doesn't work with copper, for example. Neither do traditional techniques for etching circuits. And errant, minute traces of copper rubbed on a wafer can destroy a batch of chips. Analysts predicted that production hiccups could result in annoyances for medium-sized producers or in financial disasters for larger ones.

"It was pretty scary, frankly, at the beginning," said Mark Bohr, an Intel fellow and director of architecture and integration.

Nonetheless, the conversion has been unnaturally quiet. IBM, which released the first copper chips in 1998, is almost all copper now, and Advanced Micro Devices started churning out copper Athlons last year without incident. Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Via and Sun Microsystems, among others, have all launched their first copper wares in recent months, with volume production to follow soon.

Continued at address shown

[janus]

Butte, Montana lives again!

[afraidfortherepublic]

Filing at tech_index.

[Henry F. Bowman]

I can imagine that you could do 100 chips with a penny's worth of raw copper. There is already more copper in the leads/pins than there would be on the chip, by many orders of magnitude.

There is probably more copper in a single new house wiring than there would be in all the chips produced by Intel in a month.

Feel free to correct me with some data (micrograms of copper per chip, number of chips per year, total copper production per year) and we can judge the effect of this relative to the market.

[gridlock]

You are right on the money. The amount of metal in a chip would be miniscule. Not enough to put even a slight blip into the commodities exchanges.

[John Locke]

Minor correction. If you measue by volume - eg cross sectional area - copper is the better conductor. If you measure by weight, however, aluminum is better. So if weight is a critical factor, stick with aluminum.

Secondly, chips made with copper will have fractionally lower raw materials cost but substantially higher fabrication cost. The chips will probably be more expensive, and the commodities markets, as has been mentioned, will move by half a whisker.

[gridlock]

On the other hand, if we get into a good ol' shoot 'em up war, with lots of equipment blown up and lots of infrastructure destroyed, copper might be a good bet!