NEC to invest 3 billion yen in broadband chip facility

Nov. 20, 2001 – Tokyo, Japan – NEC Corp. aims to spend some 3 billion yen to set up a trial production line for advanced semiconductors for use in broadband telecommunications and other equipment, company sources said.

A three-story, 11,000-sqare-meter plant will be built by March at a Shiga Prefecture-based subsidiary, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported. It will house a 2,000-square-meter cleanroom and advanced production machines, including e-beam steppers and crystal-growth equipment.

A total of some 130 NEC engineers, who are currently dispersed throughout Shiga, Ibaraki, and other prefectures, will be brought together to work at the new facility to develop devices such as diodes used in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) equipment. These devices will be made with gallium arsenide and other compounds.

The facility will be built next to NEC’s semiconductor plant, to speed up the process from R&D through to production and marketing.

This October, NEC spun off its division dedicated to chips for broadband telecommunications to form NEC Compound Semiconductor Devices Ltd. in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, the company that will operate the trial production facility.

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