Chia Song Hwee, who took over as CEO of Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing four months ago, has a two-pronged strategy for attracting new customers to the Singapore foundry. Chartered wants to broaden its technology offerings at quarter-micron and 0.18-micron design rules, offering E2PROM and one-time-programmable memories, BiCMOS RF and silicon germanium capabilities.
Many customers are targeting new designs at mature line widths, if 0.18 micron can be considered mature, rather than forging ahead into the more-costly mask sets required for leading-edge designs.
Oki Electric, for example, decided to partition its Bluetooth chip, putting much of it on a Chartered 0.18-micron logic process. Oki was content to keep flash on a separate die, rather than integrating memory and logic on more-advanced design rules.
Others, particularly Japanese customers in the consumer arena, are targeting new designs on 0.18-micron design rules to save costs. Some PDA and cell phone customers, and Cirrus Logic with its DVD optical-storage ICs, are not rushing into 0.13-micron and 90-nanometer processes.
Thrust No. 2 is to persuade companies to target their 90-nm designs to Chartered's homegrown 90-nm process. "Homegrown" because Chartered has partnered with Bell Labs researchers and Agere Systems on process technology. But as Agere goes fab "lite" (or fabless, if it can manage to find a buyer for its Orlando, Fla., fab), this process partnership will expire at 130 nm.
Chartered expects to run two multiproject wafers next year with 90-nm designs, and will be able to manufacture prototype SRAMs and other development vehicles as early as the fourth quarter of this year. Besides looking for design teams willing to make Chartered their "first-source" manufacturing partner, the foundry needs what Chia calls "an anchor tenant" for its 300-mm fab, which is now expected to move into prototype manufacturing by the third quarter of 2003.
Chartered suffered during the current downturn because two of its largest customers lost volume sockets to competitors, which drove down Chartered's capacity utilization to the 40 percent range. Nevertheless, to justify the investments needed to equip the 300-mm shell, and to get its 90-nm technology moving into commercial production next year, Chia is looking for volume customers that need the density (400,000 gates/mm2) that 90-nm design rules will deliver.
In today's economy, it won't be easy, but after the past two years of pain, "we know that we have to earn it," Chia said.
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