Good News Time

I had the pleasure to meet with Thomas Neyer, Vice President of High Voltage Semiconductor Technology at Fairchild Semiconductor, to discuss the setup of the company's new High Voltage R&D Centre in Munich. Prior to working at Fairchild, Thomas served at Grace Semiconductor in Shanghai as EVP and Head of R&D and Fab Operation with the Vision to build the first Foundry for differentiated Technologies in Asia. Thomas holds a PhD in Physics from the Vienna University of Technology. This was an enjoyable meeting for me personally with the announcement of Fairchild's new High Voltage R&D Centre, which will develop innovative products for the automotive and industrial markets. Thomas is now evaluating the availability of suitable premises to house the company's exciting new venture. Thomas explained to me, that with the focus on Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles to use clean energy with low emissions, Fairchild is well placed to exploit this lucrative market. At the moment Japanese suppliers have over 50% of the HEV market share, but by 2016 strategy analysts predict that the EV market will be more uniformly spread. The opportunity for Fairchild is immense. Hence the applaudable investment in this R&D centre. The scope of the new centre will include: • Device and process simulation • Design and layout • Characterization and testing lab • Process integration, device architecture, • New materials and module development. For the initial phase, Fairchild is currently building the team for the start-up of this inspirational and expanding centre in Munich including fundamental and scientific research which has a high strategic impact and priority within this successful global company. The mission of this team will be to advance Fairchild's power technology and product portfolio for High Voltage applications for Industrial, Automotive and Consumer markets to take over the leading-edge position in the industry. The newly formed R&D centre will liaise closely with existing global Fairchild Technologists in US, Sweden and Korea, as well as to work in partnership with Research institutes and hand selected partnership programs with competitors. The start-up team of the new centre will address next generation IGBT and SuperJunction device concepts utilizing state-of-the-art process and device simulation techniques, establishing new processing modules in Fairchild's advanced 6/8" manufacturing plants and focusing on improved device ruggedness and key figures of merit. Hence, wafer level device characterization, modelling expertise and advanced high power packaging expertise will be established accordingly. For the mid-term horizon, more efforts are being assigned to pursue development of wide bandgap switches and rectifiers, which are predicted to take over significant market share for high power and high efficiency types of application in the second half of this decade. Fairchild is certainly in this for the long-haul. Notably, in order to seize a head start in this, Fairchild has recently acquired TranSiC in Stockholm, which owns significant IP and expertise in SiC technology. Moreover, Fairchild is assessing several options to make a bold move into GaN technology where the R&D centre in Munich will be instrumental to mature and commercialize new product lines. Certainly this is good news for Fairchild, and great news for our industry. www.fairchildsemi.com