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Technology Stocks : Tower Semiconductor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yosi s who wrote (1812)	9/19/1999 3:12:00 PM
From: yosi s	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1853

AUSTIN, Texas ? Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector is seeking to add manufacturing capacity by taking a stake in the Dresden facility owned by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.,.... ... Moreover, the semiconductor market is far more upbeat than just eight months ago, when the company was shutting down 15 older Motorola fabs and locking up 0.25-micron capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and other foundries. Famine to feast.... ... "Now, we are ramping capacity as fast as possible. The lead times on equipment are much longer, but there is no doubt we could use more capacity, as quickly as we can ramp it." .... ... Motorola now gets fully 30 percent of its total wafer fabrication, packaging and test, from foundries and contract test and assembly houses. That is well ahead of the 24 percent goal that was expected by this time, an acceleration driven by demand. Greg White, general manager of the microcontroller division, said MCU sales are expected to increase 45 percent this year. Asked if Motorola would need to put its customers or distributors on allocation, White said, "I went through the upturn in '93 and '94, and we are nowhere near that in terms of capacity limitations. Right now it is hard to keep up, but we are getting more capacity from our foundry partners. And Motorola is moving a lot quicker than in the past to tighter process geometries, from 0.5 to 0.35 and to quarter-micron, where we want the bulk of our production to be." "Our foundry partners had invested pretty heavily during the last downturn, and we moved early enough to secure wafers." Nesbit, Motorola's point man for foundry strategy, said much of the company's foundry capacity now comes from a network of smaller foundries in Japan, Israel, Canada and the United States. In addition, by running its own fabs round the clock at higher efficiencies, Moto "squeezed out the equivalent of two new fabs from internal production." Production at foundries will triple for Motorola this year, but the unit increase in square inches of processed silicon will be much larger at Motorola's own fabs, which still account for 70 percent of production. Walker said he expects that by year's end, wafer production will have increased by 50 percent over 1998 ? "the sharpest upturn in the 34 years I've been in the industry." ....