AMI Opens 8-inch Wafer Fab Facility

American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI; Pocatello, Idaho) has announced the opening of its 8-inch submicron wafer fabrication facility. Fab 10 is a 175,000 square foot building with a 40,000 square foot clean room. Currently, the facility is producing 0.8 mm geometries and prototyping 0.6 mm and 0.5 mm geometries. Future plans call for 0.35 mm geometries in 1998.

AMI's new facility is capable of producing 2,200 wafers a week during phase 1 and is clean linked to an already existing Fab 9. Phase 1 has 20,000 square feet of clean room that is currently outfitted with an infrastructure in place to expand to 40,000 square feet based on market demands.

AMI has also started production of a +3.3 VDC 0.5mm digital complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process. With this process, AMI will be able to build devices with densities up to 6,000 usable gates/mm2. The new 0.5 mm designs are currently being produced in Fab 9 and prototype in Fab 10.