Jan 30, 2003- Global 12-inch fab investment to reach US$60 billion this year, says MIC
digitimes.com
As chip manufacturers worldwide dive into 12-inch volume production, Taiwan’s Market Intelligence Center (MIC) predicts that global 12-inch fab investment this year will total US$60 billion or more.
MIC estimates over forty 12-inch fabs will be established by 2007. Considering that each 12-inch fab costs between US$2.5 billion and US$3.5 billion, the market research unit forecasts that total 12-inch fab investment by 2007 will reach between US$120 billion and US$150 billion.
According to MIC, 60% of the 12-inch fabs will be devoted to the foundry and DRAM businesses, and most will be clustered in the Asia-Pacific region. In the future, technologies based on copper (Cu), silicon germanium (SiGe), low-k, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and strained silicon would become increasingly important in 12-inch production, which will escalate toward the 90nm and 65nm nodes.
Demand for 12-inch production will come primarily from 256Mbit and denser DRAM, high-speed Ethernet chips, embedded ICs, microprocessor units and CPUs 32-bits and above, stated MIC.
Towards the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001, Trecenti Technologies in Japan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) led the way in 12-inch volume production. Then, Samsung Electronics and Infineon Technologies started up 12-inch volume production near the end of 2001. Sony’s LCD and CCD sensor 12-inch fab entered volume production in March 2002, followed closely by Texas Instruments, Intel, IBM and Taiwan’s ProMOS Technologies and Powerchip Semiconductor Corporation (PSC).
It must all be used for something :)
Cheers
Cor |
