India’s search for an exclusive semiconductor park has come to an end with the inauguration of the Semicon Park Pvt. Ltd. in Bangalore in early July.

The new facility is path breaking as it is India’s first one-stop, post-design and post-fab service facility for domestic chipmakers. A test facility has already commenced, and board-manufacturing facilities will be available by the end of the year.

Total investments of about $15 million are planned. The new facility is based on Taiwan’s cluster model, which caused Taiwan’s rise as a leading chip manufacturer.

Expatriate Indians working in Silicon Valley
are the major investors in the facility, located on five acres including 350,000 square feet of workspace. The park also includes a packaging service provider and a system-level programming company.

Arizona pips India for Intel Plant:
Intel Corp., the maker of computer chips, plans to build an advanced $3 billion semiconductor production plant in Arizona that will begin operations within the next two years. Intel said it planned to construct the new 300-millimeter silicon wafer fabrication facility, deemed ‘Fab 32’, as the third chip plant in a three-factory site in Chandler, Arizona.

Production of leading-edge microprocessors is slated to begin in the second-half of 2007. Wafers measuring 300 millimeters across offer twice the capacity of older, 200-millimeter, wafer technology. Intel is moving to convert older wafer plants to 300-millimeter capacity.

Intel plans to use forty-five nanometer technology, which is two generations ahead of the current 90-nanometer technology presently used among major chipmakers worldwide.