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Technology Stocks : Spansion Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rink who wrote (2086)	10/4/2007 7:05:58 AM
From: Rink	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4590

World's first 300mm NOR fabrication plant opens (instead of the 500wspw this article mentions 1000wspw): computerworld.com Couple of quotes from page 2: ... It's expected to increase from the current 1,000 wafers per week to 20,000 wafers per month by the end of 2008. He predicted that the Silicon Valley-based firm will be able to "chop 30%" out of its manufacturing costs by moving from 200mm to 300mm wafer production. ... the building uses state-of-the-art techniques to make its clean room more flexible, "so they can expand it whenever they need to." For example, he said, there are fewer walls separating clean room operations. Rather than following traditional fab practices of maintaining the clean room area at Class 1 (in which a single particle is allowed per cubic meter of air), the service area at Class 100 and access to the service area at Class 1,000, the wafers are managed inside "airtight pods of very highly clean air." "The only areas that are ultraclean are the insides of machines and the insides of the pods that move the wafers in and out," ... But cost containment can take Spansion only so far. Looming on the horizon is Samsung Corp., which, according to market intelligence firm iSuppli Corp., had only 13% of the NOR flash market share compared with Spansion's 32% in the first half of 2007. According to Handy, Samsung has announced its intention "to be No. 1 in NOR by 2009 or 2010. If they follow through with that, they're going to be giving everyone in the market a run for their money, because they have the wherewithal to take prices lower than anybody else." _________ Regards, Rink