Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Trouble in East Fishkill? IBM chip group struggles. IBM Corp.'s server business is coming off one of its better quarters, but its new sibling in the Systems and Technology Group, IBM's microelectronics division, continues to struggle as yield problems plague its new manufacturing facility in East Fishkill, New York. [InfoWorld: Top News] I sincerely hope IBM can invoke its own Andy Grove style statistical quality control and get the yields up on ther PowerPC 970FX lines. Andy Grove always stated flatly if you cannot measure it you cannot manage it. I would like to think IBM can match the ruthless level Grove did in improving the number of in spec CPUs coming from each wafer. How cool would it be to have every chip run at 2Ghz and in some cases declocked to meet the need for lower speed 1.8Ghz Cpus. At the end of the day, I hope one of the IBM managers rises to the occasion and can provide that stable managerial base that gets yields up the way Andy Grove did when they switched from 6inch wafers to 8inch wafers back in 1988, or so. 7:59:25 PM    comment []