October 22, 2009 – Allvia, a specialty foundry focused on through-silicon via (TSV) technology, is expanding its manufacturing capabilities away from high-cost Silicon Valley to a newly-purchased facility in Oregon — a site with its own chip manufacturing pedigree.

The firm said the site — cryptically described as a 178,000 sq. ft. (60,000 in cleanroom space) "former semiconductor equipment manufacturing facility" in Hillsboro, OR — would be brought up to operational sometime in 2010. The company would not disclose the tooling and upgrades it is planning, nor the monetary investment it will make (and whether that includes a piece of the $5M in funding it scored back in February 2009), nor the schedule for ramping the site or eventual capacity levels.

Allvia’s current site in Sunnyvale, CA, opened in 2004 and ramped in 2007, offers TSV prototyping "and some volume production" in a far smaller ~6000 sq. ft. of cleanroom space, will be kept operational "for the foreseeable future," but eventually volume manufacturing will be "gradually" shifted north to Oregon, according to the company. Economic factors swaying Allvia to Oregon included the site’s "attractive purchase price" and cheaper operating expenses including electricity, water, and even taxes, said Allvia CEO Sergey Savastiouk, in a statement; he also noted "a tremendous talent pool of engineers and fab personnel in that community."

Some sleuthing unearths the identity of the anonymous Allvia acquisition: it’s the old ETEC Systems facility in the Evergreen Technology Center, built in 1997 and acquired by Applied Materials in 2000, and eventually shuttered in late 2005. The current owner, real estate investor Equastone, bought it from Applied in Jan. 2007. Public records indicate the site’s asking price had been lowered from $16.5M to $9.9M. The final pricetag, though, may have been as little as $5.25M — an "attractive price" indeed!