Philips Semiconductors and TSMC announce new benchmark in lab construction
Philips Semiconductors and TSMC announce new benchmark in lab construction
Keywords Philips Semiconductors, TSMC
Philips Semiconductors, an affiliate of Royal Philips Electronics, and TSMC announced that the Systems-on-Silicon Manufacturing Company (SSMC) lab being built in Singapore is ahead of schedule and ready for the installation of manufacturing equipment. SSMC is the joint venture company of Philips Semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and the Singapore Economic Development Board Investments (EDBI).
Peter Yates, SSMC's CEO commented: "By building on the experience of both Philips Semiconductors and TSMC, our highly focussed team has been able to construct a full-scale, 30,000 wafers per month capable lab faster than either parent company to date. Construction started less than a year ago with the first pile being driven in June 1999 and now we are installing the first tools, which sets a new benchmark for constructing a lab of this scale. The co-operation of the EDB has been outstanding and was fundamental to helping us achieve this in record time".
Stuart McIntosh, the SSMC board chairman and chief operations officer of Philips Semiconductors, continued: "This is a tremendous achievement and a world-record performance for a lab of this scale. When we first announced our intention to build this lab in late 1998, the semiconductor industry was in recession, but we predicted that we would need the capacity of this lab in late 2000 to meet the next upswing in the semiconductor market demand. With the experience from Philips Semiconductors' MOS4 lab in Nijmegen, The Netherlands,which set a world record of 98 days from first equipment to first yielding wafers, the SSMC lab is all set to produce first silicon in September. This will ramp up to 10,000 wafers per month over the following months and culminate in a maximum monthly output of 30,000 wafers per month by June 2002. This will enable us to take advantage of the demand upturn in the industry and meet the needs for our state-of-the-art, systems-on-silicon solutions".
