Spansion seals $150M fab sale, unveils MirrorBit Eclipse

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 4/3/2007

Pure-play flash memory solutions provider Spansion Inc. announced today it has closed the sale of Spansion Japan's older JV1 and JV2 manufacturing facilities in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan to Fujitsu Ltd. and to Fujitsu's subsidiary company, Fujitsu Semiconductor Technology Inc.

The deal follows a purchase agreement between the parties inked last September. Under the terms of the agreement, Fujitsu has paid Spansion approximately $150 million in cash and will continue production of Spansion flash memory products as a foundry for Spansion.

Spansion said it intends to use the cash from the transaction, combined with structured financing, to fund its SP1 300-mm manufacturing facility in Aizu-Wakamatsu.

In a separate announcement today, Spansion unveiled a new MirrorBit Eclipse architecture that the company said combines MirrorBit NOR, ORNAND and Quad flash memory on a single die.

The chipset's NOR interface and execute-in-place (XIP) approach is meant to allow handset OEMs to reduce the amount of DRAM in the system, while the MirrorBit NOR, ORNAND and Quad combination on a single die allows for performance improvements such as running code at high speeds and storing large amounts of multimedia content.

In addition, Spansion claimed that the MirrorBit Eclipse architecture integrates a programmable microcontroller which replaces the conventional state machine typically used in Flash memory and also supports built-in self test.

Spansion said it expects first silicon in Q3, and plans to sample 65-nm MirrorBit Eclipse solutions built from 300-mm wafers at its SP1 facility later this year.