It’s been a kind of Greek or Shakespearian tragedy. The North Tyneside wafer fab was cursed before birth, and everything went wrong for it thereafter. An unwanted baby, it became an unwanted child, and the announcement today of its dismemberment and sale completes the sorry saga.
With today’s sale by Atmel of the North Tyneside wafer fab to TSMC and the local business park, the chance of the fab ever making a chip again becomes remote.
Once TSMC have stripped out the equipment it will be a shell. A very well built, huge shell, with some very nice offices attached, but it’s terribly difficult to think what use it could be put to.
It’s been a sad tale When Siemens Semiconductors needed a new fab back in the mid-1990s, the internal opinion inside Siemens Semiconductor was that it should be built in Graz in Austria. They already had a facility at Graz. It was nearish to Munich. Austrians speak the lingo. The ski-ing is good.
Instead, the matter was taken out of the hands of the semiconductor guys, and into the hands of parent company Siemens Ag and from there into the arena of high politics.
UK Prime Minister John Major, personally lobbied Siemens CEO Heinrich von Pierer to get the plant. Major saw von Pierer twice, the second time during the Wimbledon tennis championships where Major made a last-minute increased offer of grant aid to secure the plant for the UK.
Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, later denied the UK had contributed £200m to the cost of the £1.12bn wafer fab, but he wouldn’t reveal the true figure. He had lobbied von Pierer on numerous occasions to get the fab located in the UK and, when all was won, said:
“This is the largest single high-tech investment ever made in Britain and puts us at the forefront of world semiconductor technology. It confirms, too, that, as far as international mobile blue-chip investment is concerned, the UK is Europe's competitive base. The Siemens plant will make a substantial contribution to the balance of payments by providing £200m in import substitution and £700m in exports every year.”
How wrong he was.
The plant was opened by the Queen in 1997.
It had been trailed that it was to be logic fab, and therefore, to an extent, immunised from the worst vagaries of the semiconductor cycle. Then, shortly before the first wafers were run, it was announced that the plant would be used to make DRAMs.
The following year, 1998, the DRAM market collapsed, production was stopped and Siemens announced that the fab would be mothballed..
After two years’ lying fallow, the plant was sold to Atmel in 2000, which received a £30m regional development grant to re-open the fab.
At that time, Perlegos said Atmel would invest $500m in the plant to bring it up to 0.18 micron processing. It was envisaged that the plant would create up to 1,500 jobs.
Timeo Graecis et dona ferentes, one might say.
But George got booted out last year, so he can’t be blamed for this latest disaster.
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