The transition in wafer size has always been a risky project in the past. Even for very sophisticated and wealthy companies it was a painful experience. Using the synergy of the know how and share the costs Infineon Technologies and Motorola announced in 1998 a Joint venture (Semiconductor 300) for a 300mm pilot line located in Dresden. Based on the standards provided by i300i and Selete (i.e. CIM/ Automation or FOUP requirements, process specifications), the equipment manufacturers could provide the simultaneous availability of all required tools. When SC300 started first test results were already available and the visibility "first sample of a working transistor" was already shown by Motorola. The factors to influence the productivity improvement of 30% per year, become smaller so the manufacturing effectiveness has to gain to keep the improvement rate. The focus was directed to reliability of the tools, whereas the process performance was assessed as a "must criteria". The equipment industry has grown tremendous in the last years so the financial strength and expertise has grown as well. All the new ideas of improvement which could not implemented in the existing tool set went into the design of the new generation. A key factor for the success of the SC300mm project has been the open relationship with the equipment suppliers. Jointly the tools were tested and stressed under manufacturing conditions. The technology which was used to ramp up the 300mm pilot line was a state of the art DRAM product. With the redundancy of a DRAM the impact of defect density is limited and so learning cycles were faster. With the help of the local infrastructure of the 200mm production line, which ran the same product, problems were solved faster. The success of the first 300mm pilot line nine month after tool installation, demonstrates the potential of the existing tool set.