The acquisition includes a 168-acre campus site with an 8-inch plant capable of producing 8 million parts per year--or up to $500 million per year of revenue. The purchase price for the campus, facility, and all equipment is $40 million.

"This world-class facility can be augmented, with additional equipment, to support annual revenues of up to $1 billion," said Vijay Ullal, Maxim's vice president of worldwide process technology, in a statement. "It is production ready, and we intend to begin manufacturing operations by December 2004 to support our long-range revenue plan," he said.

"This acquisition is consistent with our commitment to our customers to supply state-of-the-art mixed-signal analog technology, in volume, at the lowest cost in our industry," he said.

In March, consumer electronics giant Philips of the Netherlands announced a recovery plan for its semiconductor division that involves the closure of a wafer fab in San Antonio, Texas, and the cutting of 1600 jobs by the end of the year. About 520 of those jobs are in San Antonio, the company said.

The plan was expected to provide Philips Semiconductor with annual savings of about 250 million euros (about $270 million) and help return the division to profitability in the fourth quarter of 2003. The closure of the San Antonio fab, a facility inherited by Philips with the acquisition of VLSI Technology Inc., together with the previsously announced closure of an Albuquerque, New Mexico fab, is expected to strip out approximately 20 percent of Philips' CMOS manufacturing capacity