The joint venture of STMicroelectronics and Hynix Semiconductors laid the first stone at the site of their front-end memory-manufacturing facility in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, China.

The total investment for the project is $2 billion to be financed with equity from both partners, with Hynix contributing 67 percent and ST at 33 percent, along with $250 million of long-term debt from ST, and financing from Chinese local financial institutions.

The new fab is to manufacture both DRAM and NAND flash memories.

Hynix said the fab would provide it with another global manufacturing facility that would resolve trade issues including countervailing duties imposed on the company¡¦s products in the U.S. and Europe.

From ST¡¦s perspective, the company looks to the fab to allow it to better serve its key telecom and consumer customers with memory, multimedia processor, and system solutions in single packages on leading-edge technologies.

At the new fab site, an 8-inch wafer line is scheduled to begin production by the end of this year, initially with a stable manufacturing process transferred from Hynix¡¦ existing fabs in Korea. Shortly thereafter, a 12-inch wafer line is expected to begin production in late 2006.

By: DocMemory
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