Sony to spend $936 million to construct 300mm LCD/CCD fab

Kyushu Island, Japan—Sony will start construction of its first 300mm fab this month. The 300mm fab will be located in the Kumamoto Technology Park #2 in Kikuchi County, Kumamoto Prefecture, on Kyushu Island.

Sony's total investment in the fab through 2005 will be 100 billion yen (US $936 million). The new fab will employ a combination of several minilines each with a capacity of 3,000 wafers/month and will be expanded step by step. The new facility will be environmentally friendly by employing a mini-environment concept with zero emissions.

The fab will be operational in October 2001 and will begin with LCD production, in 2002, producing 300mm quartz wafers for camcorder viewfinders. By 2003, Sony will start 300mm wafer processing of CCD (charge-coupled device) image sensors. The initial CCD production level is expected to be 2,000 wafers/month, in 2003. The final capacity is expected to be some 12,000 300mm wafers/month.

Sony Kokubu's present production capacity is 850,000 LCD units per month, and 2.6 million CCD chips per month, the company expects those figures to double, with the addition of the 300mm fab in Kumamoto.

Initially, the facility will employ 300 people with 160 to be transferred from Kokubu and the remaining 140 to be hired in Kumamoto. The site occupies 150,000 square meters and total cleanroom floor space will be 2000 square meters. The facility will be a seven-story building with two floors of ISO Class 6 (Class 1,000) cleanrooms.—Staff Reports

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