PARIS -- Motorola Inc. today announced it will join a 300-mm wafer-processing R&D alliance between Royal Philips Electronics N.V. and STMicroelectronics in Crolles, France. The three companies have agreed to form a new five-year alliance to jointly pursue processes from the 90-nm to 32-nm nodes in the 300-mm R&D facility, located at STMicroelectronics' plant site near Grenoble, France.
In addition, the Motorola-Philips-ST alliance--now called "Crolles2"--will include development activities and process alignment efforts with silicon foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. Last month, Philips, ST, and TSMC struck an R&D partnership for compatible 90- (0.09-micron) and 65-nm (0.065-micron) processes in production fabs (see March 5 story).
As part of the new Motorola-Philips-ST alliance, France's CEA/LETI laboratories will increase its research efforts in next-generation chip technologies at its nearby Grenoble labs.
"The beauty of this alliance is that it will dramatically accelerate the development of future technologies, ensure proliferation of those technologies throughout the industry, and at the same time result in lower costs for each member of the joint development project," said Fred Shlapak, president of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, based in Austin, Tex.
"For Motorola, this kind of teamwork is a critical element for our 'asset-light strategy," he said, referring to the company's strategy to outsource up to half of its CMOS chips to outside foundries while concentrating on unique and advanced technologies (see Dec. 19 story).
The R&D partners said Motorola brings to the Philips-ST alliance its portfolio of leading-edge technologies, including silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and embedded MRAM (magnetoresistive random access memory) technologies as well as its experience in advanced copper interconnect processes. Motorola's new contribution will be added on top of the existing cooperation between Philips and ST in core CMOS processes, which includes embedded DRAM, SRAM and analog CMOS.
Motorola, Philips and ST will be equal technology partners in the "Crolles2" alliance in terms of capital expenditure, R&D costs and wafer load for the fab. Their joint investment will total $1.4 billion by 2005.
Philips in the Netherlands and ST, based near Geneva, have been technology-process partners for 10years. The two European chip makers expanded their cooperation to 300-mm wafer technology and pilot production at ST's plant site in Crolles, France, a couple of year ago (see April 13 story). On Thursday, reports of Motorola joining the Philips-ST alliance began to circulate in Europe prior to today's announcement.
Since the late 1990s, Motorola had been teamed with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to develop next-generation copper-based process technologies, but that alliance is now ending at the 100-nm
(0.10-micron) node. AMD has struck a new R&D partnership and 300-mm foundry agreement with Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corp. (see Jan. 31 story).
"The fact that Motorola has joined with us in the development of future semiconductor process and manufacturing technologies is a testament to the level of success that has already been achieved by Philips, STMicroelectronics and the various research institutes involved in the 'Crolles2' project," said Scott McGregor, CEO of Philips Semiconductors. "Being part of this comprehensive alliance in breakthrough technology development will put us in an unprecedented position to deliver the silicon system solutions that help people effortlessly connect to information, entertainment and services."
TSMC will participate with the Crolles2 alliance to achieve alignment of CMOS platform technology between the partners and its commercial foundry process.
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