BUILDING ON THE PAST, READY FOR THE FUTURE: - MEMC

diameter silicon wafers. We will also begin
building for the future by proceeding immediately
with plans to construct a new facility for 200mm
wafers for both TI and general market demands.”
That expansion came to fruition in 1997 and
represented an investment of almost $300 million.
This freed up MEMC Southwest’s existing
manufacturing facility for the captive production
of TI’s smaller diameter wafer requirements.
MeMC, InC.: a gloBal CoMPany
Through its joint ventures and other alliances,
MEMC implemented a process whereby localized
sourcing and technical service provided significant
competitive advantages. MEMC’s geographically
diverse production network allowed the company
to service the world’s key semiconductor
markets while remaining close, strategically and
geographically, to its most important asset—the
customer. Other than the Korean Plan, which is 20
percent owned by Samsung, currently, all original
joint ventures are 100 percent MEMC owned and
operated.
Fifty years after its inception as a pioneering
plant in St. Peters, Missouri, MEMC Electronic
Materials, Inc., remains a global leader in the
silicon wafer industry. With a worldwide network
for manufacturing polysilicon, wafer production,
and finishing, MEMC’s scope is truly global.
the large-sCale IntegratIon (lsI) era
When first developed, integrated circuits
contained only a few transistors. Referred to as
small-scale integration or SSI, they used circuits
containing transistors numbering in the tens. By
the late 1960s, devices contained hundreds of
transistors on each chip, called medium-scale
integration or MSI. The mid-1970s ushered in the
era of large-scale integration or LSI with tens of
thousands of transistors per chip. Predictably, the
next generation, starting in the 1980s, was that
of Very Large-Scale Integration or VLSI, using
Double side wafer grinder at MEMC Southwest’s modifications
area, April 1997.
First completed crystal at MEMC Southwest, December 1996.
hundreds of thousands of transistors. The term
VLSI has since been supplanted by ULSI or Ultra
Large-Scale Integration to refer to an integrated
circuit with more than one million components
per chip.
Each successive generation of IC capacity requires
increasing levels of perfection in silicon wafer
technology. Throughout the 1990s, MEMC
developed silicon wafers that provided optimal
solutions for VLSI-era device manufacturers and
A Global Company 57