July 23, 2008 — Asia Pacific Microsystems Inc. (APM) has reached an alliance agreement with semiconductor foundry UMC for 8-inch MEMS wafer fab capacity. As part of this agreement, UMC and APM will collaborate to support current and future customers for the 8-inch MEMS process. UMC will provide the fab manufacturing, logistic management and any required capacity expansion. APM will bring its MEMS process technologies.
The joint APM-UMC MEMS team has been working together during the last 18 months for this development. An 8-inch MEMS prototype line has been set up in one of UMC’s fabs and will soon begin process qualification on one product.
“We are pleased to partner with APM for this MEMS alliance,” says W Y Chen, senior VP of UMC. “Through this cooperative effort, UMC will be able to offer customers a one-stop solution for CMOS-MEMS integration to accelerate their time to market.”

Ming-Ru Chen, president of APM, notes: “With this alliance, APM is poised to serve our customers with a roadmap to benefit the cost curve from the 8-inch wafer process. 8-inch wafer also offers easy integration to sub-0.35µm CMOS process, which is not available on 6-inch CMOS processes.”