Fab ramps up to meet demand

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 12, 2006

To support increased customer demand, Silterra Malaysia has increased production capacity of its manufacturing fab by 20% to 33,500 wafer starts per month.

In order to support increased customer demand, Silterra Malaysia has increased production capacity of its manufacturing fab by 20% to 33,500 wafer starts per month.

A portion of the capacity is dedicated to the CL130G 0.13um copper process; the rest is capable of supporting designs at the 0.18 and 0.16um technology nodes.

The company plans to complete its Fab 1 expansion to reach 40,000 wafer starts per month of capacity by the end of 2006.

Bruce Gray, Chief Executive Officer of Silterra, stated: "We anticipated the increase in customer demand and expanded our capacity accordingly".

"Even with the added capacity, our fab utilisation rate is over 95% right now".

"Our plan is to build out the fab to the maximum capacity of 40,000 wafer starts per month with state-of-the-art 0.13um equipment by year end".

"We are ramping up volume on the 0.16um node, which will contribute to our revenue significantly for the rest of the year".

"The present indications are that Silterra's business level in 2006 will be considerably above that of 2005".

Silterra's CL160G, a cost reduction version of the company's high volume CL180G process, provides fifteen to nineteen% area advantage to existing 0.18um designs.

The linear shrink methodology does not require customers to redesign their products in order to enjoy the cost savings.

Silterra has ramped up volume production of several consumer applications in the process.

Most of Silterra's future fab expansion will be in advanced copper metallisation capacity for its major foundry matched CL130G process.

Volume production is expected to begin later in 2006.

In addition to the high demand for its logic processes, Silterra's high-density high-voltage process technologies are also running at peak capacity.

This includes the company's advanced CL180H32 0.18um 32V process featuring a very high density 4um2 SRAM cell for high volume mobile handset display driver applications.