News Article
Not just a flash in the pan for NAND with completion of $3.5 billion factory
Samsung Electronics Co. has announced the opening of one of the largest 300mm NAND flash memory wafer plants in Austin, Texas.
Samsung Electronics Co. has announced the opening of one of the largest 300mm NAND flash memory wafer plants in Austin, Texas. The 1.6 million square foot building -- as spacious as nine football fields and one of the biggest buildings in Austin – is also one of the largest single semiconductor facilities in the United States. The first product of the new plant will be 16Gb NAND flash chips using 50-nanometer level process technology. The $3.5 billion facility will initiate operation in the second half of 2007 and ramp up to produce 60,000 wafers per month by 2008."This plant will house a highly skilled workforce that can keep up with the demands of the growing handheld device industry," said Texas Governor, Rick Perry. "We welcome the capital investment by global companies like Samsung, and in return, offer a business environment with low taxes, reasonable regulations and good schools.""With the Austin plant, Samsung will supply the American market with advanced flash memory products," said Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman & CEO Jong-Yong Yun. The plant will manufacture NAND flash memory chips, which are widely used in a host of consumer-related products, such as MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras, and other mobile devices. NAND chips can also be found in the ubiquitous flash drives that consumers use to store photos, documents, music and other multimedia data as well as the new solid state drives for PCs. NAND flash memory is popular in a growing number of mobile products because flash memory does not lose its data when its power supply is turned off.Samsung has committed to an investment of $3.5 billion for the project, making it one of the largest single foreign investment in Texas and one of the largest in the United States. Previously, the largest foreign investment in Texas was the existing Samsung memory plant, which cost about $1.4 billion in 1996.With construction breaking ground in April 2006, the new high-tech factory is adjacent to the existing eight-inch (200mm) wafer fabrication plant in Austin. The existing plant was completed in 1997 and will continue to be used to manufacture DRAM.The new fabrication plant, or "fab," will be the city's first to produce semiconductors on a 300 millimetre (12-inch) wafer. The 300 millimetre wafer is 2.25 times larger than the 200 millimetre (eight-inch) wafer now used at the first fab. The 12-inch wafer can typically hold about 1,200 standard 256-megabit memory chips, compared to about 500 such chips on an eight-inch wafer.From a structural perspective, it will be almost two times as large as the existing facility, which was formerly the largest semiconductor fab in Austin. The current eight-inch plant will continue to operate, producing a mix of memory chips for computers and mobile devices.
