Dude! There’s a fab in Newport Beach
Gil Amelio has had quite a career in the semiconductor industry. He started at Bell Labs, birthplace of the transistor, in the 1960s. From 1971 to 1983, he worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, where the modern planar IC was born. From 1983 to 1988, he served as president of the Rockwell’s Semiconductor Products unit, an early modem and microprocessor chip innovator, and then as president of the Rockwell Communications Systems division from 1988 to 1991. From 1991 to 1996, Amelio served as Chairman and CEO of analog powerhouse National Semiconductor. When he joined National, the company wasn’t doing well and Amelio is credited with turning the company around. Then he went to Apple, but that’s a different sort of story with a different sort of ending.
Today, Amelio is Chairman and CEO of another semiconductor company: Jazz Semiconductor. In a way, he’s back to his roots. Jazz Semi’s fab is located about five blocks from the striding statue of John Wayne located in the Orange County airport. This is the former Rockewell fab that Amelio ran in the 1980s, which became the Conexant fab when Rockwell spun out its semi division and named the new company Conexant. I visited Jazz last Friday during the company’s annual technology day. There’s still a Conexant sign next to the dumpster out in the back parking lot, even though Amelio’s Aquicor investment firm bought the place for $260 million late last year.
Jazz Semiconductor, true to its Rockwell heritage, is a boutique semiconductor foundry. It’s running RF, analog, and high-voltage CMOS and BiCMOS processes on 8-inch wafer lines. Consequently, Jazz is not currently a volume producer of low-cost digital wafers. It’s not competing directly with TSMC, IBM, Chartered, or the other digital, mass-market fabs. Jazz is finding its own way in the 21st-century semiconductor market and the company serves as an interesting reminder that differentiation can still pay well.
Jazz runs about 20,000 wafers/month through its Newport Beach fab. The focus is not on digital chips but on wireless, optical networking, power management, storage, and high-performance applications, which Jazz has dubbed the AIMS (analog-intensive, mixed-signal) market. The bulk of the wafers are still running on a 350nm process with 180nm and 130nm designs just ramping up and 90nm in the planning stage. The typical Jazz customer is more interested in on-chip capacitors, inductors, and RF transistors with 100GHz fts than in how many digital FETs Jazz can cram in a mm2. Nevertheless, Jazz can put upwards of 200,000 digital FETs in a mm2 if needed using its 130nm process.
One of the “secret sauces” in Jazz’ semiconductor recipe box is SiGe transistors. (Now most of the people I have talked with pronounce “SiGe” as “siggy.” Jazz’ Newport-speak for the term is “sigh-gee.” Must be surfer talk.) Jazz’ SiGe transistors deliver fts in excess of 200GHz, so Jazz silicon can be used directly in many RF applications. In fact, Jazz has its sights set on using silicon to replace high-volume GaAs parts such as antenna switches and power amplifiers, which are ubiquitous in cell phones. Jazz is developing what it calls a “Silicon Radio Platform” that promises to eradicate GaAs parts, resulting in a claimed 50% die cost savings and a 20% cost reduction. The SiGe process adder bumps silicon wafer costs by about 20%.
The visit to Jazz was refreshing, if only to remember that ours is still a highly varied industry with lots of interesting innovation taking place, sometimes in the most unlikely of places.
