Startup plans to leverage Bulgarian wafer fab

Startup plans to leverage Bulgarian wafer fab
MUNICH, Germany — Silway SA (Bordeaux, France) plans to use a Bulgarian wafer fab acquired by its parent company to help it compete on price as supplier of semiconductors for low-cost telecommunications and industrial applications.

Silway's parent, EGP Holdings (Strasbourg, France), a conglomerate that owns a number of French electronic equipment makers, created Silway out of two design centers from its Misil Technologies subsidiary and a wafer fabrication facility it acquired in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The former Misil design groups in Paris and Bordeaux, France, previously did design work independent of any manufacturing facility. They will now work with Silway Semiconductor, the renamed Bulgarian production facility.

Headquartered in Bordeaux, Silway is comprised of 60 design engineers and 100 semiconductor engineers and operators. It is lead by Jean Marie Chieppa, chief executive officer. Steve Forte, formerly president of Sierra Semiconductor BV, has been appointed as a director of Silway.

Ron Burnip, European sales manager for Silway, said the wafer fab was built under the Bulgaria's Communist regime and has remained in a continuous but low level of use since then. He declined to disclose the terms under which EGP Holdings acquired the fab, but said the facility has been within the EGP group for two years prior to the creation of Silway.

According to Burnip, the wafer fab runs a 2.0-micron, double polysilicon mixed-signal CMOS process on 4-inch wafers and is capable of producing about 5,000 wafers per month.

"It's a nice medium-sized, mixed-signal fab," Burnip said. The plant is currently being migrated to a 1.2-micron double-poly, double-metal process, where it will start to be competitive with a number of other mixed-signal CMOS operations in the same area, such as Austria Mikro Systeme (Graz, Austria).

"Sofia was processing lots of proving runs and university runs, but there are lots of talented engineers there," said Burnip. What was lacking was contact with western markets and a sense of commercial manufacturing, he said. The fab can also run a high-voltage vertical MOSFET process with a breakdown voltage of 250 V, and is moving to a 400-V breakdown in 1999.

Silway will operate as a mixed-signal ASIC vendor with an ability to create low-cost application-specific standard products aimed at the telecom and industrial markets, Burnip said. The low costs of operating a wafer fab in Bulgaria and the beneficial terms of the acquisition will enable Silway to compete on price in many applications, he said.

Given the history of Silway's design groups, the company already has a track record of more than 450 designs. Silway intends to build on this experience while concentrating on telecommunications, automotive, consumer and contactless smart card applications and passive tags, Burnip said. That history also gives Silway a range of intellectual property cores, including 4-bit and 8-bit microcontrollers. The company possesses a PIC-compatible 4-bit core and an 8051-compatible 8-bit core. The company also has its own 4-bit and 8-bit RISC cores in a family it calls Rapido, Burnip said.

In addition to custom design and manufacture Silway will market a range of standard products. It's contactless range includes transmitter and reader devices for security cards, animal and object identification applications.