New foundry aims to take over Renesas’ German fab
Claiming it cannot sustain high volume manufacturing at its Landshut site in Germany, Renesas is planning to sell the facility to a newly established German foundry company. The foundry will then use the fab to offer specialist analogue and mixed signal manufacturing capacity.
According to Renesas, it has operated at the Landshut site for 28 years. Currently, the fab is producing secure microcontroller wafers for smart card applications on 0.35 µm and 0.18 µm processes.
In order to gain the benefits of economies of scale, Renesas is concentrating production at bigger facilities and says this move will help it to remain competitive.
The German foundry – Silicon Foundry Holding (SFH) – has been set up by former RSEL managers Michael Lehnert and Gerhard Spitzlsperger, together with Hans-Martin Dudenhausen. SFH says that, being based in Europe, it is in a good position to support local markets.
Although negotiations are still in process, the deal is expected to be finalised shortly.
