BIZCHINA / Overseas Investment
Memory chip plant fires up
(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-10-11 09:51
Europe-based STMicroelectronics and South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor
held a commemoration ceremony yesterday at a joint memory chip
manufacturing facility in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province.
The plant, built with a combined investment of US$2 billion, is the
third-biggest facility of its kind on the Chinese mainland.
The new plant will manufacture both Flash and DRAM memories, which are
widely used in computers, mobile phones and music players such as the
iPod NANO, the partners said in a joint statement.
The companies laid the first stone at the 550,000 square meters Wuxi site
in April 2005. An 8-inch wafer plant started volume production in July
with a monthly capacity of 50,000 units. The 12-inch plant is scheduled
to start mass production this month with a capacity of 18,000 wafers
every month.
The JV, two-thirds controlled by STMicroelectronics, employs about 2,000
workers.
"A JV of this magnitude is likely to be the largest (in semiconductor
industry) between a Korean and European company," Carlo Bozotti,
president and chief executive, said in the statement. "It will bring both
partners significant benefits of scale."
The joint facility ranks No. 3 on the Chinese mainland in memory chip
shipments behind Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International
Corp and Suzhou-based Hejian Technology Co, according to Li Ke, an
analyst at Beijing-based CCID Consulting, a research firm under the
Ministry of Information Industry.
The facility produces DRAM - dynamic random access memory - chips for
computers and will start to make NAND-type flash memory for consumer
products by the middle of next year. The split among products and memory
densities will depend on market conditions, the statement said.
"Memory is always the spotlight of the industry as all equipment needs
it," Li said.
In 2005, the NAND Flash market grew faster than any segment in the
history of the semiconductor market, driven by a spiraling demand for
storage capacity in mobile phones, digital cameras and portable audio
players.
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