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New fab accelerates STMicro's MEMS push |
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Dec 01, 2006 at 10:43 AM |
ST Microelectronics has been making a big push in its MEMS business of late, including the announcement earlier this week that it has inaugurated a 200-mm fab line dedicated to microelectromechanical system manufacturing.
The facility, managed by Luciano Gandolfi, is located at the company's campus in Agrate, Italy, not far from Milan.
I contacted Michael Markowitz, ST's director of worldwide technical media relations, to get some additional information about the fab. He confirms that the company has invested $40 million so far to upgrade an existing 150-mm line to 200-mm capability, although he would not say what kind of unit-cost savings that ST has gained or hopes to gain by moving to the larger wafer size. He also could not disclose the fab's wafer starts but noted that the facility is now 1300 square meters (about 13,990 square feet), with an increase to 2500 square meters (26,910 square feet) of production floor space possible, if demand dictates the necessity for added capacity.
ST is running its proprietary MEMS process called THELMA (for "thick epitaxial layer for microactuators and accelerometers") at the fab, according to Markowitz, with linewidth capability down to 0.35 microns. Approximately 90% of the equipment is new, including some wafer-to-wafer bonding gear. He would not say whether the toolset features any CMP systems. MEMS wafers fabbed on the Agrate line are sent to ST's Malta facility for assembly and packaging.
ST says that it is "the first major MEMS manufacturer in the world to produce devices using 200-mm wafers." Skeptical of this claim, I made a quick call to one of my contacts at Texas Instruments, itself a leading MEMS manufacturer of digital light processing (DLP) chips. My TI source confirmed that its digital micromirror devices are fabbed on 200-mm wafers too, and I suspect there might be other MEMS makers using the larger wafers. Nonetheless, the vast majority of devices are made on 150-mm and smaller substrates.
Despite this overreaching boast, ST has positioned itself with the rollout of its dedicated MEMS facility to take advantage of the fast-growing global demand for microscale accelerometers, microphones, gyroscopes, sensors, and the like, a market that could hit $10 billion by 2010.
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