Start-Up of Samsung’s Largest U.S. Plant Marks Comeback of Austin’s Semiconductor Industry

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--This summer, Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Austin, Texas), a part of Samsung Electronics Company Limited (Seoul, South Korea) completed construction of its colossal Fab 2 complex in Austin, Texas. The company has since begun to install the manufacturing equipment so that the plant can begin commercial production of memory chips before the end of the year.

The $3.5 billion plant will manufacture 16 GB NAND or more commonly called flash memory, which is used in portable music players, digital cameras and camcorders, as well as cell phones. Apple is a major customer of Samsung, utilizing flash memory for iPods and iPhones. This is Samsung’s second plant in Austin, the first, Fab 1, manufactures 60,000 Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips per month – most commonly used in personal computers, workstations and servers. Fab 2 is double the size of the original 10-year-old plant at 1,538,000 square feet with a 300,000 square foot “Class One” cleanroom. “Class one” cleanrooms are the cleanest of all, with no more than one speck of dust per cubic foot.

The new plant will also utilize new technology stepping up to 300mm (12-inch) diameter chips, rather than the 200mm (8-inch) chips used at the old plant. This will be the first plant in the Austin area to use the 300mm, 50 nanometers, which are about 1/2,000th the thickness of a human hair. The difference in the wafer diameter will allow Samsung to make 2.25 times as many chips on a single wafer, decreasing overall energy consumption and water usage. The energy savings will be substantial, considering that the new plant will be the largest single electrical consumer in the Austin area, using enough electricity to power 30,000 homes.

The new plant is the first chip plant built in Central Texas since 1998. Austin’s chip-related employment is making a comeback from when five plants in the region were closed by Motorola Incorporated (now Freescale Semiconductor) and Advanced Micro Devices Incorporated (AMD). Samsung’s chip plant, built in 1998, was the last one built in Austin. AMD has built its most recent plants in Germany, and Freescale Semiconductor Incorporated hasn’t built a plant since the mid-1990s. Fab 1 and Fab 2 are Samsung’s first chip plants built outside of Korea. The plants are next to each other on a 300-acre site.

Samsung is utilizing Samsung Pacific Construction Incorporated (SPCI) of Korea as the general contractor. Samsung owns SPCI. Austin Commercial Incorporated (Dallas, Texas) is leading construction of the office building. Hensel Phelps (Greeley, Colorado) was the structural erection contractor. Applied Materials (NYSE:AMAT )(Santa Clara, California) is supplying a majority of the process equipment for the plant.

Once complete, the three-story plant will manufacture 60,000 wafers per month and employ 700 people plus an additional 200 from suppliers.

This month, Samsung shut down six of its chip-production lines at Samsung’s Giheung complex near Seoul because of a problem at the switchboard at a transformer substation that lead to a power outage. It is estimated that the outage could lead to a loss between 10 percent of company’s total monthly production, roughly 1 percent of global NAND output during the second quarter, costing the company $41 million in business.

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