NEC fab ramping up for Xenos mass production.

[PC-Engine]

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/sh...FSBWS0QSNDBCSKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=163701578

NEC doubles plan at 300-mm fab launch

Yoshiko Hara
EE Times
(05/27/2005 5:57 AM EDT)

TOKYO — NEC Electronics Corp. has officially celebrated the launch of its 300-mm wafer fab at Yamagata and has started to ramp its manufacturing capacity towards 20,000 wafers a month. The fab is scheduled to make an embedded graphics chip for inclusion in Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console and the chip is expected to be one of the fab's first major products.
The 20,000 wafer per month figure is double the manufacturing capacity of an original plan announced in April 2004.

The fab, at NEC Electronic's wholly-owned semiconductor manufacturing subsidiary in Tsuruoka city, Yamagata prefecture in the northern part of Japan, is designed to join a newly-built B fab to an existing A fab and 300-mm wafer production is due to expand from the A fab to the B fab. The company said that the fab could be flexibly expanded depending on the demand. The 300-mm line, which started operation last December at the existing A fab with a monthly capacity of 4,000 wafers, is equipped with facilities for 130- and 90-nanometer manufacturing processes. With the official launch, the company said it plans to expand into the new B fab to reach 6,000 wafers a month by September.

NEC Electronics has invested about 80 billion yen (about $742 million) on the 300-mm fab in the last fiscal year and plans to add another 50 billion yen (about $464 million) in this fiscal year.

 

[AlNom]

fab....ulous.

 

[Qroach]

Oh pad pun

 

[Guden Oden]

I'm always amazed how gamers can suddenly become interested in completely boring bullshit like fab production press releases etc...

Wake me up when the x360s start hitting shop shelves instead, will ya? *yyaawwnn*

 

[AlNom]

I'm always amazed how gamers can suddenly become interested in completely boring bullshit like fab production press releases etc...

Wake me up when the x360s start hitting shop shelves instead, will ya? *yyaawwnn*

sh...I'm an EE. I think it's neat. How about I don't wake you up.


When they say XXXmm wafer, that's the diameter, right? So they're making the entire graphics chip? They say "embedded"... Confuzzled.

 

[Magnum PI]

wasn't flipper manufactured by nec also ?

it's funny how the choices MS made for the xbox 360 mimicks the choice made by nintendo for the gamecube.

 

[AlNom]

They might have been impressed with Nintendo's profitable hardware.

 

[Megadrive1988]

is the entire GPU being fabbed by NEC, or just the eDRAM part?

I'm so confused. I thought TSMC was fabbing the main GPU. or would they be fabbed together.. maybe they'd have to be.

 

[Dave Baumann]

TSMC parent die, NEC daughter die, packed on a single flipchip package by ASE. No guarantees that it will stay two separate dies though.

 

[jvd]

TSMC parent die, NEC daughter die, packed on a single flipchip package by ASE. No guarantees that it will stay two separate dies though.

i would think that at some point they would combine the two as it would be cheaper , most likely with a process change .

anyway good news wonder what other parts we are going to hear about next

 

[MrSingh]

I've actually been to NEC's fab in Yamagata 9 years ago. They had an N64 and a Playstation displayed in the main lobby (they manufactured the N64 CPU/GPU and the Playstation CPU).

 

[PC-Engine]

I've actually been to NEC's fab in Yamagata 9 years ago. They had an N64 and a Playstation displayed in the main lobby (they manufactured the N64 CPU/GPU and the Playstation CPU).

That's pretty interesting. I thought SONY or LSI Logic manufactured the PS1 CPU.

 

[gkar1]

I'm always amazed how gamers can suddenly become interested in completely boring bullshit like fab production press releases etc...

Wake me up when the x360s start hitting shop shelves instead, will ya? *yyaawwnn*

Its amazing how someone will just spam completely boring bullshit in a thread. Most of us here are electric engineering students and this is the stuff we'll be doing down the road. I'm sure its not as glamorous as your "gamer" profession right?