Feb

27

Richard Chang - Fab Person of the Year

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This week, Richard Chang was named the 2007 Fab Person of the Year by Semiconductor International. Richard Chang is a colorful and controversial figure who is highly regarded as “Father of China Semiconductor” or “Traitor of Taiwan Semiconductor”. He is the founder and CEO of China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). Under his helm in the last 7 years, SMIC has already built 5 Fabs and developed into the world’s top four foundries. The first fab, Fab 1, was established in Apr 2000 and started full production in Jan 2002. In the same year, Fab 2 and Fab3B began full production. In Jan 2004, SMIC acquired Motorola Fab in Tianjin and named the fab as Fab 7. SMIC went IPO in New York and Hong Kong in Mar 2004. SMIC first 300mm fab, Fab 4 was started in 2004 and gone into volume production the following year. SMIC’s 2nd 300mm fab, Fab 8, began production in 2007. Over the last few years, SMIC has significantly enhanced its in house process technology from 0.18um to 65nm technology. This year, it even struck a major deal with the Shenzhen municipal government to build a 200 and 300 mm fabs in Shenzhen. In addition, the 300mm fab will use 45-nm technology licensed from IBM (Ref).

Richard Chang himself was born in Nanjing in 1948. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University and a master’s degree in Engineering Science from the State University of New York. He started his career in Texas Instruments and worked there for 20 years. Over his tenure in TI, he had managed 10 TI Fabs in US, Japan, Singapore, Italy and Taiwan. Richard Chang retired from TI in 1997. He then became president of Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, (WSMC) from 1998-1999. However, WSMC was acquired by rival TSMC in 1999 when Richard was on his business trip. After this humiliating event, Richard Chang went to Shanghai to establish SMIC in 2000.

If you are interested in SMIC and Richard Chang, I highly recommend the following videos


 

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Feb

21

TSMC Clinched Sun Microsystem’s UltraSPARC Processor Deal

Filed Under Foundry, Microprocessor, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

The biggest news that rocks the semiconductor industry this week is probably the announcement by Sun Microsystems on Wednesday that it will outsource its UltraSPARC processor manufacturing to the world number one foundry TSMC (Ref). The UltraSPARC processors will be made using TSMC’s 45nm bulk CMOS process. The deal is significant to TSMC in three aspects. First, it is expected to generate an annual revenue of 500 million USD for TSMC. Second, it propels TSMC to be the major microprocessor manufacturer. Third, it strongly validates TSMC’s 45nm process technology. TI will provide the turnkey backend support for SPARC product roadmap, including testing and packaging (Ref).

Five years ago, Sun Microsystems was facing a near dealth. It had just lost $2.72bn (£1.4bn) on revenues of $11.4bn (Ref). Since then, Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz transformed the company by embracing open source softwares as the company’s key strategy of growth. In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice. In 2000, it released StarOffice as the open source office suite OpenOffice. In Jan this year, Sun made headlines by acquiring MySQL, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion (Ref). The open source movement has indeed revived the company. Two weeks ago, Sun Microsystems announced their revenues for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.615 billion, an increase of approximately 1.4 percent as compared with $3.566 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2007. Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis was $260 million. You can listen to Jonathan Schwartz presentation at the 2008 analyst summit in the following video.

 

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