Intel's Shanghai plant to assemble Pentium chips

["Ulhas Joglekar" <joglekarulhas@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Times of India

THURSDAY, MAY 09, 2002

Intel's Shanghai plant to assemble Pentium chips

REUTERS

SHANGHAI: US semiconductor giant Intel Corp said on Thursday it was setting
up facilities to assemble and test Pentium 4 chips at its Shanghai plant,
but has no immediate plans to set up a wafer fab in China.

"What we are now seeing is assembly and test technology and that is taking
wafers and cutting them into individual chips, assembling them and then
testing them here," Intel CEO Craig Barrett told a news conference.

Intel said the new facility for the Pentiums, built on 0.13 micron
technology, would be completed by the end of this year and the
microprocessors bearing "Made in China" stamps would be produced in the
first half of 2003. Intel currently makes its chips in the United States and
Ireland then ships them to be assembled and tested in the Philippines,
Malaysia and Costa Rica, company officials said.

Barrett said he expected output at the Shanghai facility, which Intel poured
$302 million into last September on top of an initial $198 million
investment, to match the three other plants, though that might require some
time. The Shanghai plant tests and assembles FLASH memory chips used in
handsets and hand-held computers.

There is also a production line to test and assemble i845 chipsets -- which
control the flow of data between various chips in a computer -- for Pentium
4 microprocessors based on the 0.18 micron technology, Intel said.

Although some Taiwan-backed firms, such as Grace Semiconductor and
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, have set up chip-making
facilities in China due to the potentially huge domestic market, Intel has
so such plans yet, Barrett said. "At this point in time we have no plans for
wafer fab manufacturing but we continue to investigate the options," Barrett
said.

"The general areas we will look at would be the availability of the labour
force, the cost of doing business, the infrastructure," he said.

"There has to be a strong infrastructure in place to support the basic
utilities, chemicals and the process equipment that we use," he said. The
Shanghai facility expects to employ 3,000 people in Shanghai by 2004 from
about 1,200 now, Intel officials said.

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