Qimonda expands chip site

Chinese memory chip supplier Qimonda is to expand its facility for the assembly and testing of memory integrated circuits in the Suzhou Industrial Park, Suzhou, west of Shanghai.

Qimonda will construct a second building doubling the factory’s capacity. Investment in construction of new facility, including infrastructure, production equipment and IT, will amount to around €250m over the next three years.

Construction of the new facility is scheduled to begin in March 2007, with the site ready for equipment installation by late 2007. A new clean room of 10,000m² will be added to the existing clean room of the same size. The expansion will also result in a significant increase in staff.

Qimonda uses five 300mm manufacturing sites on three continents and currently uses four sites for back-end manufacturing. In addition to Suzhou, back-end sites are located in Malaysia, Portugal and Germany.

The back-end manufacturing process comprises of two major steps. Firstly, the processed wafers are diced into individual chips and, after interconnecting pins are added, the chips are encapsulated into a packaged component using a compound material. After testing, components are often soldered onto circuit printed boards to create modules.