Honeywell will officially open its new fab for radiation-hardened ASICs on April 27, bringing the process node down to 0.15-micron.

The total footprint of the new Minnesota facility is 24,700 square feet with a clean room box of 8,000 square feet. Wafer capacity will be tool dependent, but officials expect the facility to produce 10,000 wafers this year, but the facility won’t fully ramp until 2006. Much of the funding for the Honeywell facility came from a $150 million U.S. Department of Defense grant.

“We are transferring the technology that we have jointly developed with Cypress Semiconductor to our fab,” said Gary Kirchner, director of engineering for Honeywell's defense and space group, which is part of the company's $8.8 billion aerospace division.  Honeywell announced the Cypress partnership last year as a way to accelerate its move to 0.15-micron.  Cypress was looking to gain knowledge of the use of silicon-on-insulator technology from Honeywell.

As called for in the partnership deal, Cypress has been producing radiation tolerant chips at its own Minnesota fab. The chips produced by Honeywell, however, will be radiation-hardened.

“This will be a big milestone for 0.15-micron rad-hard CMOS capability,” said Kirchner. “We will be one of only facilities with dual sourcing capability, Cypress and Honeywell. And this is the first rad-hard that is 8 inch. Everything has been 6 inch previously.”

By: DocMemory
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