Ulrich Schumacher, Infineon president, told EBN in an interview that the dual 300mm wafer fabs will put his firm far ahead of DRAM rivals. He claimed Samsung Electronics, the next closest 300mm DRAM competition, won't launch production until Q4 '02.

He agreed that two 300mm fabs in production next year will more than double the number of DRAM die per wafer over existing 200mm fabs. But he denied that this much higher yields will extend the global DRAM oversupply just when chip companies had hoped supply would come into balance with demand.

"The extra die from our 300mm wafer fabs will only increase Infineon's global market share by 2 percentage points. That won't have a major impact on the global supply of DRAMs," he claimed.

Schumacher was interviewed at a public ceremony of the launching of 300mm wafer production at Dresden.

Klaus Mueller, Infineon managing director of operations for the new 300mm facility, said initially the fab will have wafer starts of a few thousand a month, ramping up by the end of 2002 to 17,000 300mm wafer starts a month. In full production the Dresden fab will have 26,000 wafer starts a month.

Refuting critics who warned the transition to 300mm wafer production would pose major difficulty, Mueller said the $1.2 billion Dresden fab "was built on schedule, under budget, and without any major problems except normal hiccups."

He dismissed ed the claim by Micron Technology Chairman Steve Appleton that 300mm wafer blanks cost $600 each and would be prohibitively more expensive than current 200mm wafer processing. He said Infineon is paying less than Appleton's$600 estimate -- he wouldn't reveal precise cost -- and expected the price of wafer blanks to drop rapidly as volume demand increased.

Mueller said that when the Dresden volumes ramped to 4,000 300mm wafers a week, the production costs would cross over that of 200mm wafers. As Infineon ramped up 300mm wafer output further, it would reach the target 30% cost savings over 200-mm fabs.

The fab is starting with 0.14-micron processing and will move to 0.11-micron processing by the end of 2002. The fab is using 248nm wavelength scanners with optical proximity correction and some phase shift masks with dual suppliers, ASML and Canon.

The ProMOS 300mm fab is a copy exact of the Dresden facility, Mueller said.

Infineon has installed several 193nm wavelength lithography tools, from both ASML and Canon, in development work at its 200mm fabs in Dresden. He didn't see 193nm scanners being installed on a test basis in the 300mm fab until 2003.