The director of AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden said today that the company had succeeded this month in producing a K6 using its copper technology. But success with the K6 in copper is merely a warm up for production of the K7 Athlon, according to Hans Jeppe, who runs the facility, He confirmed that the fab was capable of producing 5,500 wafer starts a week, but declined to say how many of the dies would be good ones. There will be 300 K7 Athlons per wafer at .18 micron. On a tour of the facility, AMD and Jeppe were keen to stress that the fab has put in place a contamination management unit which would help isolate defects from the factory. The Register was shown several examples of eight inch wafers, using the copper technology, which AMD has already produced at Fab 30. And, explained Jeppe, AMD is on target to move to .18 copper technology by year end. He said that copper technology was inherently less expensive than using aluminium interconnects. On the K6, he said: "We'll probably deliver some K6s out of this technology but this is not our target, it is our warmup technology." He said: "Our target was to use this as a transition technology and it has been successfully completed on the 7 July. .18 micron [copper] is on target for the end of this year." AMD and its partner Motorola are already working on .13 micron versions of the technology, said Jeppe. We will provide a full report on our tour of Dresden tomorrow, on our return to London. ® See also: AMD fabs first copper parts - 1GHz Athlon by year end?