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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tech101 who wrote (35083)	5/9/2000 1:31:00 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Toshiba, SanDisk plan $700 million expansion for flash chips at fab in Virginia Joint venture, called FlashVision, set; partners also expect to develop high-density memories, controllers By Jack Robertson Semiconductor Business News (05/09/00, 08:56:01 AM EDT) MANASSAS, Va.--Toshiba Corp. and SanDisk Corp. today announced plans to invest $700 million in an 8-inch wafer fab here to increase production of advanced flash memory chips for digital cameras, music players, next-generation cellular phones, and other memory card applications. The investment is part of a planned joint venture in flash memories announced last fall by Toshiba and SanDisk (see Oct. 7 story). While the two companies said they expected to make the investment last fall, the $700 million figure is much higher than previously discussed, according to sources close to the negotiations. Toshiba and SanDisk also today announced a new company, called FlashVision LLC, which will use the expanded production space in the Dominion Semiconductor LLC facility here. Dominion was originally set up as a joint-venture DRAM fab between Toshiba and IBM Corp. Last year, IBM announced it was pulling out of the DRAM partnership, and Toshiba officials in Japan decided to use the Virginia fab to expand its flash memory capacity. Under the new agreement between Toshiba and SanDisk of Sunnyvale, Calif., the expanded Dominion fab output will be equally divided between Toshiba and SanDisk for flash memory devices. By 2002, the flash capacity from the joint venture is expected to support annual revenues of more than $1 billion a year. Investment costs and ownership of FlashVision will be shared equally by Toshiba and SanDisk under the joint-venture agreement. Managers at Dominion said 600 workers will be hired to handle the extra wafer-processing volumes for FlashVision. Production of NAND flash memories is expected to start in the second half of 2001, with high volumes of processed wafers slated in 2002. Specific figures on planned wafer starts were not released by the companies. During interviews today, officials said the FlashVision venture will build out the now-vacant second module of Dominion's Fab 1. Alex Graham, president of Dominion Semiconductor, said the new flash module will be filled with advanced process equipment for 0.16-micron processes compared to the fab's existing tool set for 0.2-micron production of DRAMs. He said the advanced technology will allow the joint venture to initially make 256-megabit NAND flash, but later it will produce monolithic 512-Mbit chips. SanDisk president and CEO Eli Harari said this will be the first time his company has used Toshiba technology to produce flash memories for its products. Up to now SanDisk had used foundries -- predominately United Microelectronics Corp. in Taiwan -- for its NAND flash-based memory cards. Harari claimed the second module in Dominion's Fab 1 will give the Virginia facility "critical mass" to become a world-class semiconductor plant. "Up to now, Dominion didn't have critical mass, but the combination of DRAM and flash will make the fab a factor in the market," he asserted. The expansion at Dominion "will be a major factor driving Toshiba's 35% annual growth" in semiconductor, according to Yasuo Morimoto, president and CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor Co., based in Tokyo. In an interview, he predicted that Toshiba's chip sales will reach $15 billion in 2002, up from $9 billion in the 2000 fiscal year, ended March 31. Graham said the Dominion fab is now ramping up DRAM production in its first module. The facility is expected to produce 50 million 128-Mbit DRAMs in 2000 while it prepares for flash production. Officials said the Manassas site has enough land for two additional wafer fabs. When Dominion decides to build another fab, that new plant will be used for additional flash output, not DRAMs, according to Graham. In addition to the joint-venture company, Toshiba and SanDisk have said they will collaborate in the development of 512-megabit, 1-gigabit and 2-Gbit flash memories as well as other next-generation devices. These memory chips will be fabricated with 0.16- and 0.13-micron process technologies, Toshiba said. The devices will also employ SanDisk's proprietary multilevel-cell technology. The two companies also said they plan to develop advanced controllers, including secure digital memory card controllers. Toshiba and SanDisk expect a final agreement in the flash partnership to be completed by the end of June. --Additional reporting by J. Robert Lineback