Intel Corp says it won’t be rushing to implement burn-in testing of integrated circuits at the wafer level, the technology Motorola Inc began talking up this week (CI No 3,466). It says it participated in industry efforts to explore the pros and cons of the technique for many years, but took a hard look five years ago and opted not to do it. Since then, it says it put a series of incremental improvements in place instead. We have no plans to use the technology for our current line of processors, an Intel spokesperson said, adding that it’s fairly expensive to implement. Intel won’t comment officially on the new rush of manufacturing, lithography and process techniques that its competitors are now talking about, but unofficially, it’s skeptical about the reasons behind all the fuss. A source pointed to the recent talk about copper as being a key ingredient for getting to 1GHz chips by the Year 2000: If you look at published roadmaps and Moore’s law, that’s where we will all be anyway. But it has to be done in volume. Intel says it does intend to move to copper, but doesn’t see a short-term benefit until the design process and tools are all in place. It’s much less convinced about IBM’s talk about Silicon on Insulator (CI No 3,466), saying that it believes that the benefits will be too small for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, said the source, if it doesn’t directly affect the performance or power consumption of the chips themselves then it’s just another way of doing the job.
