TowerJazz to acquire Maxim fab
Specialist foundry company TowerJazz has signed an agreement with Maxim Integrated Products to purchase Maxim's 8-inch fabrication facility in San Antonio, Texas, US. The transaction, which is expected to close in January 2016, is to be paid with ordinary shares with a value of approximately $40 million.
The proposed purchase will expand TowerJazz's manufacturing capacity by approximately 28,000 wafers per month.
TowerJazz offers a broad range of customisable process technologies including SiGe BiCMOS and RF CMOS (SOI and bulk) for radio frequency and high performance analogue applications. For many years it has been Maxim's supplier for a family of high-end SiGe based products.
According to TowerJazz, Maxim's San Antonio facility will be able to support the advanced analogue platforms using geometries down to 130nm and can be used also to manufacture third party products using TowerJazz specialty process technologies. TowerJazz plans to quickly qualify its core specialty technologies, including its advanced Radio-Frequency Silicon-on-Insulator (RF-SOI) offering, to serve the substantial growth in demand from its customers.
"We are very excited about this fab purchase. It will provide a quick solution for our significantly growing customer demand, while gaining additional high quality manufacturing capabilities and global flexibility with the incremental capacity," said Itzhak Edrei, TowerJazz's President. "The multi-year supply agreement with Maxim and the new available capacity will enable continuous growth with increased manufacturing scale to support our position as the worldwide leading specialty analogue foundry."
"The San Antonio factory enables us to further strengthen our relationship with Maxim, in a true win-win business model enabling TowerJazz incremental capacity supported by a proven high performing technical and operational team," said Russell Ellwanger, TowerJazz's CEO.
"We needed a trusted partner to manage our proprietary process technology who also shared our commitment to the employees in San Antonio. Tower Jazz has a proven track record with Maxim and similar beliefs about employees, so this is a natural fit. I look forward to our continued partnership over the coming years," said Vivek Jain, senior VP of Maxim Integrated's Technology and Manufacturing Group. "With this arrangement, we will continue to support our customers for years to come, improve utilisation in our Oregon fab, and advance our manufacturing flexibility."
As part of the transaction, the companies have also signed a long-term supply agreement for TowerJazz to manufacture products for Maxim in the San Antonio facility. All of the site's nearly 500 employees will be retained. The headcount consists of production operators, highly experienced production support personnel and process and integration engineers, the majority of which possess graduate degrees.
