Siemens plans 300-mm pilot line

04/01/1997

Siemens plans 300-mm pilot line

Ulrich Schumacher, group president of Siemens, announced recently that the company intends to build a 300-mm wafer processing pilot line in Dresden. If Siemens goes ahead without a partner, the line will definitely be located there, he said; but even if a partner is found, Dresden is still likely to be the choice. Siemens estimates that a pilot line running 400 wafers/week will cost $220 million.

In another development, Siemens has joined the SyncLink Consortium, which hopes to create a license-free, industry-standard DRAM architecture that will allow data-transfer rates up to 3.2 Gbytes/sec. SyncLink was founded by Hyundai, Micron, Fujitsu, and Mitsubishi, and they have since been joined by - among others- such industry heavyweights as Hitachi, Texas Instruments, IBM Microelectronics, Toshiba, NEC, and Samsung. In addition to the DRAM manufacturers, customers such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have also joined the consortium. - J.A.