Trecenti joint venture opens 300-mm fab near Tokyo
By Paul Kallender
EE Times
(04/20/01 11:15 a.m. EST)
HITACHI-NAKA CITY, JAPAN — Trecenti Technologies, a joint venture of Hitachi Ltd. and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), opened on Friday (April 20) the first fabrication facility in Japan built to support full production on 300-mm (12-inch) wafers. Company executives touted the facility as a symbol of Japan's "turning the corner" to regain position as a high-quality, low-cost maker of silicon.
The fab's four 120-meter long floors, with Jetson-esque robots whizzing wafers overhead, are targeted to make a total of 7,000 wafers per month this summer, but will be capable of producing more than four times that amount, president Toshio Nohara told EE Times. Hitachi and UMC will share the fab's output.
"The next step is to increase production," Nohara said. "If business goes up, we'll expand. We've just started SRAM and soon we'll enter ASIC production, and maybe 30 percent of the 5,000 wafers for Hitachi will be flash. We can easily produce anything, except DRAM."
The fab, which has a two-floor clean room that covers 12,000 meter2, claimed a first last December when Trecenti announced it had produced 4-Mbit and 8-Mbit SRAMs on 300-mm wafers. Nohara predicts the fab may be producing about 10,000 wafers per month this year, half of which will go to UMC, which holds a 40 percent stake in Trecenti. Hitachi owns 60 percent.
At present, the fab is firing up with production of about 2,000 wafers per month on a 0.18-micron process, mainly for SRAM and logic chips.
The roughly $580 million Trecenti venture will benefit from an uptick in demand starting about the third quarter, said Nohara, who added that he takes a "middle line" between pessimists who see the current semiconductor downturn as the bleakest since the mid-1980s, and optimists who predict a second-half recovery.
Meanwhile, Trecenti has a good customer in Hitachi, a great one in UMC, and a worldwide customer base, said Atsuyoshi Koike, a board director and Trecenti's general manager. The combined clients of the parent companies give Trecenti a customer base of over 100, he said.
The key feature of the new fab, located north of Tokyo in Hitachi-naka City, is its flexibility and efficiency, executives said. The plant can already support volume production on a 0.15-micron process and has passed all qualifications needed to run a 0.13-micron copper-based process, which will begin production this May, Nohara said. "We want to get ahead with this as soon as possible," he said.
With its fully automated lines, Trecenti believes its fab is the most automated and efficient in the world, said board director Koike. The company's single-wafer process system, which Koike called a first, can cut cycle time by 48 percent on a 25-wafer lot, and 63 percent on a 13-wafer lot compared to batch and single-cycle processes, he said.
"We want production to flow like a natural scheme," he said.
The fab's features reflect a new confidence that has transformed the way Hitachi thinks about the manufacture and sale of its silicon, Koike said. "We are a kind of leader in our field and UMC is a kind of leader in its field. Why can't a Japanese silicon company combine this sort of business model? Ten years ago Japan lost confidence and we had to find a new concept. We think we've reached the turning point."
Trecenti is the first of two 300-mm fabs in which Hitachi holds a heavy stake. The other will be run by Elpida Memory Inc., the combined DRAM operations of Hitachi and NEC Corp. The latter fab, located in Hiroshima, Japan, should launch production in late 2002. |
