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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