Mar. 18, 2008 – Taiwan’s Winbond Electronics Corp. says it has finalized the spinoff of its logic IC business, to be a wholly owned subsidiary called Nuvoton Corp., finalizing efforts announced last fall to refocus on the company’s main memory biz. The plan is expected to be approved by shareholders on April 30, and finalized in July.

Under terms of the split, Winbond will acquire all issued shares of Nuvoton for NT$10.9 (US ~$0.353) per share, with capital stock of NT$2.5B (~$81M).

The move follows a board-approved plan to reorg Winbond into five activities: consumer ICs, computer-application ICs, DRAM design, flash memory design, and memory chip manufacturing. It also marks the end of the island’s last IDM to do both memory and logic work.

The Taiwan Economic News had originally reported that Winbond’s 150mm fab (currently 50K WPM @ 0.35μm) would be allocated to the new IC division, leaving the company’s lone 300mm fab (26-27K WPM) for memory operations, with a second 300mm fab slated to be completed in late 2008 to boost 300mm output to 35K WPM. The logic IC business, including voice ICs and computer I/O chips, accounts for roughly 30% of the firm’s ~$92M monthly sales, the paper reported.