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

To: Gottfried who wrote (44557)	3/26/2001 2:20:35 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Shanghai foundry has 300mm plans By Jack Robertson EBN (03/26/01 09:59 a.m. PST) SHANGHAI, China -- Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the new 8-inch wafer foundry here slated to enter full production early next year, has follow-on plans for a 12-inch wafer pilot line. Christopher Chang, SMIC senior fellow, said the first stage of the new Shanghai fab will have capacity for 42,000 wafer starts a month. A new Fab 2 of equal size will include the 12-inch pilot line also, but its timing is still indefinite, he said. Fab 1 with 8,000 square meters of clean room space, will be completed by the end of April. A separate fab, called Fab 3C, will be completed about the same time and will be used for all metalization interconnect processing. Chang said SMIC will be able to process up to six or seven interconnect layers on a chip. A separate fab is used because the chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process creates contaminants that must be separated from the Fab 1 lines. Chang called SMIC "an American semiconductor company in China," because most of its investors are from the U.S. and the new foundry has predominately American top management. Some of the initial customers, which he could not identify, have also made minority investments in the foundry. SMIC stressed that it is fully funded by private investors, and has no Chinese government funding, as did previous semiconductor ventures started in the country. Richard Chang, SMIC president, an American who formerly headed World Wide Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. in Taiwan, spent a decade with Texas Instruments overseeing the construction of its global fabs. Christopher Chang worked for a quarter of a century with TI Central Research Lab, helping to develop plasma injection and gallium arsenide SRAMs and the first ga as 200-MHz microprocessor in 1990. Marco Mora, SMIC vice president of operations, was formerly at TI's Avazano, Italy, DRAM fab, before it was sold along with the rest of TI memory fabs to Micron Technology. Christopher Chang felt the mostly American management team would create a globally competitive foundry in China. At the same time, SMIC will tap the pool of educated technical workers in China, a benefit not always easily available in the critically tight skilled labor makret elsewhere in the world. He said a major reason to build the foundry in China was to be close to the end users of the chips. Fabless customers and integrated device manufacturers are interested in a China-based foundry so chips can be shipped quickly to the burgeoning Chinese plants of contract manufacturers and OEMs. SMIC will initially use quarter-micron processing, which Chang said was well suited to the logic devices and ASICs expected to be the bulk of orders. The firm hopes soon to migrate to 0.18-micron capability. He didn't expect the firm would have any major problems getting U.S. export control approval for upgrading to 0.18-micron production gear. The firm is using ASM Lithography scanners and "Japanese" scanners. Believed to be from Nikon. Despite the current global semiconductor market slump and excess capacity in foundries, Chang believes SMIC will be coming into the market next year at the beginning of the next upturn.