Kulim, Malaysia–Silterra Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., a full-service semiconductor-manufacturing provider, reports that it has successfully produced fully functional, yielding wafers–only 3 weeks after qualification of the complete set of wafer production equipment in its new factory in Kulim, Malaysia.

Silterra produced the silicon wafers with its CMOS25 (0.25-micron) process technology. The process qualification vehicle contains all of the process features for CMOS25, according to the company, which includes shallow trench isolation, low resistance cobalt salicide, and five layers of metal with stacked vias. There are two chips in the qualification vehicle–a logic chip and a memory chip. The logic chip contains more than 2.5 million transistors and measures 74.5-sq-mm. The memory chip, which is 26.4-sq-mm, contains half a megabit of high-speed SRAM. Both chips have yielded well, Silterra reports, especially for the first full-featured wafer lot in a brand new fab.

“I am pleased that we have reached this exciting milestone quickly,” says Cy Hannon, Silterra’s chief executive officer. “We produced high-yielding wafers on the first qualification lot that we started less than 3 weeks ago. Our success in this phase brings us a step closer to our goal, which is to generate revenue for Silterra in the first quarter of 2001. Our engineers and technicians have been working very hard to make this happen. They are very eager to start running production wafers.”