Today Sony is announcing a $918 million provision in its budget for its next fiscal year to pay for a new fab to build image sensors.

The plant is to be built in Nagasaki Prefecture and is scheduled to come on-line in April 2021.

The fab should increase Sony’s image sensor capacity from 100k 300mm wpm to 130k wpm.

It will be Sony’s first new image sensor fab to be built for twelve years although it re-purposed a Toshiba fab for sensor production in 2016.

Sony has led the image sensor market ever since it was the first to commercialize bipolar CCDs in the early 1980s. It currently has 50% of the CMOS image sensor market.

Sony’s semiconductor business made a profit of $1.32 billion in the fiscal year the end of last March – representing 16% of Sony Corp’s total profits.

By: DocMemory
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