Austria Mikro plans 8-inch fab announcement next month
By Luke Collins
Semiconductor Business News
(03/01/00, 04:58:27 PM EDT)
LONDON ( ChipWire) -- Despite low annual revenue, Austria Mikro Systeme International(AMS) is planning to build an 8-inch wafer fabrication facility to help it ramp sales and compete on a global basis, the company said.
AMS, a mixed-signal and telecommunications chip maker based in Unterpremst„tten, Austria, is expected to announce plans for the wafer fab in the next month.
"We are virtually [ready] to announce a new wafer fab at 8 inches," said Ian Wilson, who recently joined AMS in the United Kingdom as its communications product specialist.
"We have backing from the local government in Austria, partially through the European Union, an area of land has been designated, we have got planning permission and we have the backing. [The fab] will be next to the existing 4-inch fab in Austria," Wilson said.
AMS earns 90% of its revenue from mixed-signal ASICs, with the rest coming from standard telecom products like single-chip phones, dialers and LCD drivers. The company is known for its mixed-signal processes and for its ability to offer foundry services for small volumes of mixed-signal chips.
The company's in-house fab handles 4-inch wafers, and its 6-inch production is subcontracted to foundries like Newport Wafer Fab Ltd. in Newport, Wales, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and X-fab GmbH in Erfurt, Germany.
Wilson said the company now wants to "change people's perception [of AMS]from a testing fab," particularly by being able to offer volume manufacturing of comm parts "for which the market is massive and global, and where we're nowhere near saturation for the end products." Having an 8-inch fab "gives us a greater volume and ability to address major global users," Wilson said. Though Nokia and Ericsson are current customers, Wilson thinks that if they brought in a big order now, "they'd swamp everything."
"The 8-inch fab will allow us to move into that next [level and accommodate] the serious big players with global demand," he said.
But industry analyst Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons in Sevenoaks, England, doubts AMS' ability to fund the investment alone. "They might want to [have a new fab] -- their technology is getting a bit tired now. But their revenue base is pretty low at $130 million, and even a cheap 8-inch fab will cost $400 million.
"It's hard to see how they could afford an 8-inch fab," Penn said, noting that with the fab costing three or four times annual revenue, that would mean indebtedness on "Korean terms," a reference to the impact of the Asian financial crisis on South Korean chip makers.
AMS must also at least triple its revenue to pay for the fab, since for every dollar invested the company needs to get back at least a dollar to cover the investment and the costs. "If you don't you'll lose money because you're not getting overhead costs back, said Penn, adding that it's difficult to build small fabs that pay. "There's no margins in the volume stuff -- there you're talking about cost effectiveness and really competing."
AMS processes include digital and mixed-signal CMOS at critical dimensions from 2 microns to 0.35 micron, with optional high-voltage modules. The company also offers a 0.8-micron heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) CMOS technology.
In BiCMOS, AMS has processes at critical dimensions of 1.2 and 0.8 micron. A silicon-germanium option, supporting transition frequencies of 35 GHz, is available for the 0.8-micron BICMOS process.
Luke Collins is editor of Electronics Times, SBN's sister publication the United Kingdom. |
