Lextar lights up 6-inch LED wafer
According to Lextar, its New Process Project Team has employed "unique exposure and grinding technology [to] avoid the issue of wafer warp and crack, which is the most challenging in 6-inch chip processing."
Cree is building a new 150-mm LED wafer production facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), while Philips Lumileds is already mass-producing LEDs on 150-mm wafers, according to a recent announcement.
Lextar is part of the BenQ Group, which also includes LCD panel maker AU Optronics. Lextar currently has 3 manufacturing plants in Taiwan, and will set up another one in Suzhou, China in 2011. The new manufacturing site at the Suzhou Science Industrial Park will integrate upper-, middle- and down-stream manufacturing i.e. from epitaxy through to packaging and system integration. Covering a land area of over 240,000 sq.m and with a projected 5,000 employees, the facility will be ready for production in 2011 with a total investment of USD 500 million.
Lextar has also announced that its December 2010 revenue was NT$ 666 million (US$ 22.9 million), up 16.6% compared with November 2010 and up by 85.8% year-on-year.
In the fourth quarter of 2010, Lextar’s unaudited revenue totaled NT$ 1.73 billion (US$ 59.4 million). For the year ended December 31, 2010, unaudited revenue totaled NT$ 8.1 billion (US$ 278 million). This figure represents a 297% year-on-year increase compared with NT$ 2.03 billion (US$ 69.7 million) in 2009.