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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (40523)	12/6/2000 12:06:12 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

NEC to ramp U.S. 300-mm fab in 2003, says executive By Jack Robertson Electronic Buyers' News (12/06/00 07:24 a.m. PST) TOKYO -- NEC Corp. plans to build its first wholly-owned 300-mm wafer fab in Roseville, Calif., with initial production slated to start in late 2003, said Keiichi Shimakura, deputy president and head of NEC Electron Devices. In an interview at his corporate office in Tokyo, Shimakura said the new 300-mm fab will produce microcontrollers, SRAMs, and ICs for consumer electronics. The large-diameter wafer fab will play a key role in diversifying the Roseville site from DRAM production, he said. At present, the site's 6-inch (150-mm) and 8-inch (200-mm) frontend lines have already shifted most of their capacity from DRAMs, according to Shimakura. He said only a limited quantity of 16-megabit chips is being produced at the U.S. site. Industry sources have said NEC's Roseville site is now making large quantities of SRAMs, with Intel Corp. as a major customer. Shimakura said NEC's DRAM joint venture with Hitachi Ltd.--Elpida Memory Inc.--will now fulfill 300-mm capacity plans in Japan for memory production. He confirmed that Elpida's recently announced $1.4 billion 300-mm fab in Hiroshima (see Nov. 28 story) will take the place of a 300-mm plant originally planned by NEC. That NEC facility was slated to be equipped in late 2001, with production beginning in late 2002. But now, NEC's plans call for the 300-mm fab in Roseville to be equipped in 2002, with production starting in 2003, said Shimakura. Even before the 300-mm wafer fab opens in Roseville, NEC plans to upgrade the existing facility from its current 0.25-micron processes to 0.22-micron technology, and later to 0.18-micron feature sizes, said the executive.