SINGAPORE--The 300-mm wafer fab joint venture between United Microelectronics Corp. and Infineon Technologies AG here has pushed back the installation of equipment to January 2003 from an original plan of tooling its initial production line in the third quarter this year, said officials, during today's "topping off" ceremony for the completion of the plant's roofing structure.
Under the new schedule, the UMCi joint-venture fab is expected to be in pilot production during the second quarter of 2003--about five-to-six months later than originally planned, but ahead of a revised schedule that would have started wafer runs in the third quarter, according to analysts tracking foundries.
UMC believes its new schedule is well timed for the upturn. "We expect UMCi to be entering production just in time to meet the rising demand for foundry services that take advantage of UMC's state-of-the-art process technology--the technology jointly developed with Infineon, and UMC's 300-mm manufacturing experience," said Robert Tsao, chairman of Taiwan-based UMC, which is the world's second largest silicon foundry.
UMC and Munich-based Infineon announced the UMCi venture at the end of 2000, just as the last semiconductor downturn was beginning to hit the chip industry and silicon foundry business (see Dec. 14, 2000, story). The planned $3.6 billion fab complex is also jointly owned by a subsidiary of the Singapore Economic Development Board, called EDB Investments Pte. Ltd. The 300-mm (12-inch) fab is being built in two phases, with a planned total capacity of 40,000 wafers per month.
In the same manufacturing complex as UMCi--which is inside Singapore's Pasir Ris Wafer Fab Park--a second 300-mm joint venture is being planned by UMC and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The UMC-AMD venture, called AU Pte Ltd., is scheduled to begin commercial production of 65-nm (0.065-micron) microprocessors and logic ICs in 2005 (see Jan. 31 story).
The UMCi venture will focus its capacity on large die-size system-on-chip (SoC) products, using UMC's 130-nm (0.13-micron) and next-generation 90-nm (0.09-micron) processes, which feature copper and low-k dielectric interconnect structures. In preparation for the operation of the new facility, UMCi plans to hold a career fair recruiting event on May 11-12 in Singapore, officials said.
The revised target to start pilot production in Q2 of 2003 is slightly ahead of the most recent schedule at the joint venture, according to analyst Shekhar Pramanick of Prudential Securities Inc. in New York. Pramanick indicated that the venture moved back its original pilot production plans to Q3 of 2003 after last year's downturn.
"In our estimate, given the six-to-nine month tool leadtime, orders for the UMCi pilot line could be around the late Q2-to-Q3 timeframe," Pramanick said. "Phase I orders could be about $700 million for equipment."
