Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
Electronics Production |

Qimonda Doubles Back-End Capacity in China

Qimonda AG, a supplier of memory chips, today announced the planned expansion of its existing facility for the assembly and testing of memory ICs (back-end) in the Suzhou Industrial Park, Suzhou, China, located 80 kilometers west of Shanghai.

In course of the expansion, Qimonda will construct a second building doubling the factory's capacity. Investment in construction of new facility, including infrastructure, production equipment and IT, amounts to around Euro 250 million over the next three years. The expansion adds to the ongoing investment in the existing manufacturing facilities in Suzhou Industrial Park which were established starting in 2003. Construction of the new facility is scheduled to begin in March 2007, with the site ready for the equipment installation by late 2007. A new clean room of 10,000sqm will be added to the existing clean room of 10,000sqm. The expansion will also result in a significant increase of headcount. The facility currently has about 1,700 staff. At full capacity, the headcount is expected to move beyond 3,000 employees. “Growth in our front-end capacities, with more than two-thirds of our DRAM bits shipped now produced on 300mm manufacturing lines, clearly requires an increase in our back-end capacities. With the expansion in Suzhou we are now excellently set up to further leverage our competitive advantage in 300mm manufacturing," said Kin Wah Loh, President and CEO of Qimonda. Ma Ming Long, Chairman of Suzhou Industrial Park Administrative Committee (SIPAC), also addressed his support to this expansion: “Qimonda is one of the major companies in Suzhou semiconductor industry. It is the enterprise and industry that SIPAC fully supports and targets. We believe that with the completion of the second building, Qimonda will meet customers' needs effectively as well as bring the company a good return of investment in the future. In addition, this expansion strengthens Qimonda's global business development and a leading position in the memory market." Qimonda has access to five 300mm manufacturing sites on three continents and currently uses four sites for back-end manufacturing. Back-end sites are located in Suzhou (China), Malacca (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal) and Dresden (Germany). The back-end manufacturing process comprises of two major steps. Firstly, the processed wafers are diced into individual chips and, after having added interconnecting pins, the chips are encapsulated into a packaged component using compound material. After testing, components are often soldered onto circuit printed boards to create modules. The surface-mount technology (SMT) describes a method developed in the 1960s in which the components are mounted directly onto the surface of the printed circuits boards. The back-end facility in Suzhou is a joint venture of Qimonda AG and China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Venture Co (CSVC), Ltd, set up in 2003, and operates under the name of Qimonda Technologies (Suzhou) Co., Ltd.

Ad
Ad
Load more news
March 28 2024 10:16 am V22.4.20-2
Ad
Ad