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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (37280)	9/15/2000 10:43:23 AM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 70976

Taiwan's GaAs foundry race heats up as new 6-inch fab opens By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Business News (09/15/00, 10:05:40 AM EDT) TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan's Win Semiconductors Corp. here today announced it has opened the world's first 6-inch wafer fab for pure-play foundry services in the gallium-arsenide (GaAs) device arena. Taoyuan-based Win--a year-old startup founded by former executives of Lucent, Philips, and TRW--plans to begin fabrication of 6-inch (200-mm) GaAs wafers this month, with the facility ramping into volume production over the next year. Other companies in Taiwan are also jumping into GaAs technology as demand grows for high-speed communications devices and radio-frequency ICs made with the compound semiconductor material. In fact, taking a page out of the silicon foundry model established in Taiwan, nearly a dozen companies on the Island are hoping to launch GaAs-processing services over the next year, according to some industry observers here. One Taiwan company is already in GaAs production. Recently, Taiwanese foundry player Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Corp. (AWSC) opened its 4-inch GaAs wafer fab and signed an alliance with U.S.-based Conexant Systems Inc. (see April 13 story). Win appears to be the next in line to ramp GaAs foundry services. "We are the first 6-inch GaAs foundry in the world," said Chan-shin Wu, president and chief executive of Win, in an interview with SBN. And demand is already booming for Win. After years of keeping its technology in-house, GaAs-based device makers are beginning to show a strong interest towards outsourcing products, according to Wu. The trend is much like the silicon foundry business, he said. "We have more than 20 companies come to see us," he added. "The IDMs want us to serve as a second source for them." Win's GaAs fab, which cost about $100 million, is a 20,000-square-foot plant capable of making 100,000 six-inch wafers a year. Win plans to specialize on two types of GaAs processes: heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) and pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (PHEMT) technologies.