LONDON — The 300-mm M6 wafer fab in Catania Italy, which has been an empty shell for many years, is going to have to wait a little while longer before being equipped - to judge from a Numonyx manufacturing strategy that will use NAND flash to ramp fabs quickly before changing to a mixed-technology strategy to support NOR flash and other memory technologies.

Numonyx BV (Rolle, Switzerland), the flash memory company formed March 31, 2008, by the pooling of the memory operations of Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics NV, has inherited the Catania shell from ST and there was an indication that the two companies together could invest in the plant sooner rather than later (see October 2007 story).

Numonyx makes NOR flash at a 200-mm wafer fab in Kiryat Gat, Israel, that was Intel's Fab 18 and has now been relabeled Fab 1. Numonyx has acquired the Ang Mo Kio wafer fab in Singapore and renamed that Fab 2. And Numonyx is manufacturing NAND flash memory at a joint venture 300-mm wafer fab in Wuxi, China, majority owned by Hynix Semiconductor Inc. "We have plans to move to internally to 300-mm but we have to get our legs under ourselves. The end of the decade to be manufacturing [at Catania] * 2010 is a reasonable time horizon," said Ed Doller, chief technology officer of Numonyx.

"Our plans call for a 300-mm mixed technology factory. A factor in this is that NOR flash memory is an embedded technology. It is slower to ramp. So we plan to use NAND flash orders to ramp the factory quickly and then bring NOR in to keep the factory fully utilized," he said.

However, Doller acknowledged that Numonyx' lowest-cost source of NAND flash is likely to be the Wuxi fab. There is scope to increase capacity there through piece-meal investment and with the NAND flash markets in oversupply and prices weak it would probably not make sense to rush that or the opening of another wafer fab.

"The good news is that we have options," said Doller. Related articles:

Numonyx confirms 45-nm jump for phase-change memory

Numonyx Israeli fab preps 45-nm process

ST, Intel complete creation of Numonyx