Micron Technology to Build Chinese Factory
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US memory chip maker Micron Technology Inc. plans to build its first factory in China, to assemble and test semiconductors, the company said Monday.
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Micron Technology belongs to one of the most legally contentious industries in the world. The world&#39;s third-largest maker of electronic memory faces more than 25 class-action
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Chinese authorities on Tuesday approved an Intel project to produce chips on 300-millimeter wafers using a 90-nanometer manufacturing process. But because this is advanced technology, U.S. regulators may not agree.
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Advanced Micro Devices and IBM have collaborated on new strained silicon technology, which stands to boost transistor speed. In a statement ahead of the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco
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A new micro-generator developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology holds promise for micro-generator technology&#39;s future in electronics devices.
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IBM is producing a more advanced version of the Cell microprocessor, the chip it developed with Sony and Toshiba.
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(InfoWorld) - Texas Instruments, the world's largest maker of mobile phone chips, plans to work more closely with its Asian contract chip manufacturing partners to develop new production technologies, a company spokeswoman confirmed. The company said earlier this year it planned to stop developing its own chip production technologies and instead work more closely with contract manufacturing partners on joint development. A TI spokeswoman confirmed that the company plans to work with Asian contract chip makers, or foundries, on the new strategy. TI currently farms out chip production to four Asian chip foundries: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.Â (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) of Taiwan; Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing; and China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., according to Tracy Zhou, head of media relations in the Asia Pacific region for TI. "For the cooperation with foundries, TI will continue working with its current advanced logic foundry partners," she said in an e-mail. The change in tactics is significant. TI is one of the world's biggest chip makers, and has long developed its own production technologies. For any new chip, engineers must focus not only on the circuit design of the chip itself, but also on how it will be mass produced. If a design is too complicated to manufacture at a reasonable price, it can get the boot even if it has promising features. The outsourcing of chip production development by companies that previously did it mostly themselves, such as TI, has become a trend over the past several months, said Jackson Hu, the chairman of UMC, at the company's fourth quarter investor conference last month. "Some companies are even closing their own chip factories and farming out orders to foundry chip makers, while others are simply no longer investing in chip production R&D, and instead putting that investment money into chip product design efforts. We believe this is a positive industry trend, a win-win situation, and a strong affirmation of our R&D capabilities," Hu said. The fact that a company the caliber of TI is willing to leave the production side of technology development up to contract chip makers, at least in part, shows how far the foundry business has come. TSMC was the first company to focus on manufacturing chips that are designed by other companies. Before TSMC opened, small chip design firms had to ask Intel, Motorola, and other big companies to manufacture their chips, and these companies would only agree if their factories weren't already full. Most small companies didn't have enough money to set up their own chip factories because the high tech plants then cost around $1 billion each. Now, new ones cost around $3.5 billion. TSMC stepped in to fill the gap, setting up huge chip factories and taking orders from customers, mainly in the U.S. The result has been the steady growth of chip design companies that never build their own factories. Mobile phone chip developer Qualcomm and graphics chip designer NvidiaÂ are two examples of companies that have been wildly successful, despite not owning their own factories. They farm out production to foundries such as TSMC and UMC.
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Impacted with Chartered and Samsung IBM is teaming up with four other chipmakers to develop manufacturing technologies for semiconductors that shrink the average circuit feature to 32 nanometers. The alliance, which is aimed at containing the spiraling cost of building bleeding-edge chips, also involves Chartered Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, Infineon Technologies and Freescale Semiconductor.â¦
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Intel already operates assembly and test plants in China, but it could be ready to start actually making chips there.
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IBM has successfully demonstrated a new technique for improving transistor performance that will help the company build smaller, more powerful chips in the next decade, company researchers said yesterday.
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Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), China&#39;s largest chip maker, has signed a deal to license a 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process from IBM, the company said Wednesday.The licensing agreement gives SMIC rights to use IBM&#39;s 45nm bulk CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) process technology, the Chinese chip maker said in a statement. That number refers to the average size of the smallest features that can be created on a chip, and smaller is generally considered better.The 45nm process licensed by SMIC will allow the company to produce sophisticated communication chips, such as 3G (third-generation) mobile chip sets, as well as chips for graphics and consumer applications, the statement said.At present, 45nm technology is the most advanced process available for commercial semiconductor production, and chip makers are just starting to use the technology. Terms of the deal, which helps SMIC keep pace with the 45nm efforts of rival contract chip makers, were not disclosed.
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The Chinese government has given Intel permission to build a $2.5 billion chip-manufacturing plant in Dalian, on China's northeastern coast.
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Micron Technology, trying to take on widely used CCD image sensors, pushes its CMOS technology to 8 megapixels.
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Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), China's largest chip maker and also one of the world's biggest contract chip makers, Saturday formally began commercial production at a 300-millimeter semiconductor fabrication plant (fab) in Beijing called Fab 4, the first such facility to open in China.
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Breaking the speed barrier of traditional flash memory, Intel and Micron Thursday announced a new flash memory architecture that increases the data transfer rates in consumer electronics by cutting the bottlenecks affecting conventional NAND flash memory.IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, has developed an 8Gb SLC (single-level cell) high-speed NAND chip which can reach read speeds up to 200MBps and write speeds of up to 100MBps, which could mean faster data transfer between devices like solid-state drives and video cards.&quot;With the popularity of digital video cameras and video-on-demand services, high speed NAND can enable a high-definition movie to be transferred five times faster than conventional NAND,&quot; said Kirstin Bordner, a spokeswoman for Micron.Conventional NAND flash memory from Micron and other players currently transfer data at read rates of 40MBps, with write rates of about 20MBps.The speed improvements resulted from changes made to the NAND architecture and improvements in the read-write circuitry, Bordner said.This chip&#39;s architecture achieves the speed defined in the ONFI (Open NAND Flash Interface) 2.0 specification, according to Micron. Micron was one of the founders of the ONFI Working Group in 2006, and other member companies include Hynix Semiconductor, Intel, Phison Electronics, Sony and STMicroelectronics.Micron is now sampling the high-speed NAND component, with mass production expected to commence in the second half of 2008, the company said.Products based on the ONFI 2.0 specification have been under development and were expected, said Joseph Unsworth, a principal analyst at Gartner.&quot;It wasn&#39;t anything that wasn&#39;t expected. We knew that it was coming out,&quot; Unsworth said.The technology could see an immediate future for use in video and high-end photography devices that require flash memory with quick transfer speeds and reliable data retention, Unsworth said. However, it will be priced at a premium and only multimedia enthusiasts looking for high-performance flash memory would be willing buyers, Unsworth said.As prices stabilize, it will reach mainstream devices like MP3 players and digital cameras, but that could be a long time away, he said.The new flash technology from Micron and Intel could also face competition from Samsung and Toshiba, the world&#39;s top flash vendors, who combined represent 60 percent of products supplied in the NAND flash market. The two companies last year signed an agreement to share specifications to develop faster and more robust NAND interfaces, Unsworth said.While both factions will ultimately deliver high-performance flash technology to consumers, they need to unite under one banner to ease the development of high-speed flash technology. The market is split in half, and it needs one standard voice to simplify the development of flash memory for manufacturers, Unsworth said.
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The construction of a thin-film plant in China bodes well for long-term growth.
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Chip maker likely is making way for new products.