Thursday, September 9, 2004
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), mainland China's fast-growing foundry has an as-yet undisclosed partner that is helping the company develop a 90-nanometer manufacturing process for logic circuits.
The advanced nature of the technology in question, which would help put SMIC just one or two generations behind its rival foundries in Taiwan, means the number of likely candidates is limited to about half a dozen major global players or consortia.
In an interview with Silicon Strategies Richard Chang, the company's chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: "We have 90-nanometer SRAM manufacturing technology today. We need a partner for 90-nm to go to logic." Chang then re-iterated past comments that SMIC would be ready to offer 90-nm process technology for logic devices in the first six months of 2005.
Chang said SMIC has its partner in place but that he could not reveal the partner's identity. "The partner gives us a roadmap to more advanced processes. We have a team working on 65-nm manufacturing," Chang said.
Leading companies, including the leading foundries Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and United Microelectronics Corp. are beginning to research the next generation beyond that - 45-nanometer manufacturing. Chartered Semiconductor of Singapore is in an alliance with IBM Corp. for 90-nm process technology that is being joined by Infineon and Samsung at the 65-nm node. Chang said he believed, that as a result of the latest steps in its logic program, SMIC was now only one or one-and-a-half manufacturing process generations behind its competition.
Over the four years of its existence SMIC has worked with a number of integrated devices manufacturers (IDMs) that has helped it gradually catch up in process technology. SMIC is currently ramping a 110-nanometer DRAM process on behalf of Infineon Technology AG, which is to be followed by a 100-nanometer DRAM process for Elpida Memory Inc.
But dedicated memory processes with few part types is a different type of manufacturing to system-on-chip foundry work based on logic processes.
The company counts STMicroelectronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Texas Instruments Inc. among its clients. According to reports in May 2004 SMIC was taking partially finished wafers from TI and completing metallization steps in Shanghai.
This could be done, in part, to help TI meet the terms of United States compliance with the Wassenaar Arrangement, which seeks to control the export of militarily useful technology to countries such as China.
By: DocMemory
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