Spango valley is now a call centre.
Posts by EquipmentGuy
2 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2016
400 jobs to go as Texas Instruments calls time on chip fab in Scotland
TI plant closure announcement
Bad news but not entirely unexpected. Their fate was sealed when NatSemi merged with TI back in 2011. Before then NatSemi had survived the chop often at the expense of other fabs in US and further afield and by a CEO who happened to be Scots - Donald MacLeod. With the TI merger there was always the spectre of consolidation especially with TI's 300mm fab in Texas.
In the semi industry it's all about investment in the expensive processing equipment and Greenock's under investment left them vulnerable. There's quite a lot of consolidation going on right now with the biggest UK wafer fab - IR in Newport - also up for sale after the Infineon takeover last year, where Infineon have embarked on a major asset stripping exercise pushing the production processes into their 300mm fabs and moving the in-house design team to Villach in Austria. So that makes both 200mm fabs up for sale (and without customers,ruling out management buyouts ) and the Newport fab due for closure in 2017, if no buyer is found. It seems we are now seeing the demise of the semi industry in the UK but one nagging question remains : were the high relative energy costs also a factor in the closure decision,after all TI have several 200 mm fabs and they are saying the 200mm
Japan plant is more efficient.