For Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., everything really is bigger in Texas. Today in Austin, Texas, the South Korea-based technology company announced the opening of what the company claims is one of the largest semiconductor fabs in North America.

Samsung said that the 1.6 million square foot building -- as large as nine football fields—will be used to manufacture 300-mm NAND flash memory wafers with the first product of the new plant to be 16-Gbit NAND flash chips on 50-nm process technology, which the company began sampling in January. The $3.5 billion facility will initiate operation in the second half of the year and ramp up to produce 60,000 wafers per month by 2008, Samsung said.

With construction breaking ground in April 2006, the new factory is adjacent to Samsung's existing eight-inch, or 200-mm, wafer fabrication plant in Austin. The existing plant was completed in 1997 and will continue to be used to manufacture DRAM, Samsung said. The Austin semiconductor plants are the only plants outside of South Korea belonging to Samsung.

Samsung said has committed to an investment of $3.5 billion for the project, making it the largest single foreign investment in Texas, the company said. Previously, the largest foreign investment in Texas was the existing Samsung memory plant, which cost about $1.4 billion in 1996.

Samsung Austin Semiconductor has hired about 700 new employees during the construction of the plant and now has 1,600 employees in Austin. The payroll for Samsung in Austin will grow from $60 million annually to about $100 million once the new plant is in full operation. 

Key manufacturing equipment supplier Applied Materials' president and CEO Mike Splinter was at the ribbon cutting event, after which he attended his own, at which he announced Applied's plans to equip its Austin manufacturing site with solar power generation capability.

By: DocMemory
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