Matsushita Equipment To Be Sold

Electronic News, Jan 25, 1999 by Jeff Dorsch

Dallas -Matsushita Semiconductor Corp. of America last week named Henry Butcher, a British firm, and Murad Sales of Dallas as exclusive agents to sell wafer fabrication equipment from its DRAM fab in Puyallup, Wash. The 200-millimeter (eight-inch) equipment is being offered for sale in a single lot; most of the 200mm equipment was never installed in the fab, according to Henry Butcher and Murad Sales.

Matsushita decided last year to shutter the Puyallup fab (EN, Oct. 19, 1998). What will become of the facility once the wafer fab equipment is sold hasn't been decided by the Japanese company. Matsushita bought the fab from National Semiconductor in 1991.

It was originally a Fairchild Semiconductor 100mm (four-inch) fab, with a 150mm fab line added later.

The 200mm equipment, all manufactured in 1997-98, has the capability to manufacture 64-megabit SDRAMs or microprocessors with a 0.25-micron CMOS process. The equipment sale firms said the fab offers a full set of 200mm equipment, from photolithography to wafer sorting equipment.

A full inventory of equipment wasn't provided, but FSI International did make a $1 million sale of chemical management equipment to Matsushita Semiconductor Corp. of America for the Puyallup fab (EN, The Fab Line, Oct. 27, 1997). The sale included a Model P4400 slurry blending and distribution system and a ChemLitho 1500 developer blending system.

The 150mm fab line is set up to manufacture one-megabit or four-megabit DRAMs, using 0.5-micron/0.8-micron CMOS processes. All of the equipment is presently in class M1 (200mm) or M1.5 (150mm) clean rooms.

Louis Murad of Henry Butcher USA said the firms have a deadline of March 31 to sell the equipment. If no party is able to buy all of the 200mm equipment, then it will be sold piecemeal, he added.

"This equipment sale presents an incredible opportunity to purchase state-of-the-art, unused equipment at a substantial discount to new costs," said Ralph Murad, president of Murad Sales. Louis Murad, the son of Ralph Murad, described his father as "the grandfather of used equipment," having been in business for some four decades.