Motorola Inc’s former semiconductor components division, the subject of a $1.6bn management buyout led by the Texas Pacific Group earlier this year (CI No 3,659), relaunched itself as ON Semiconductor Inc yesterday. ON will stay at Motorola’s old site in Phoenix, Arizona, and will use Motorola’s existing facility there as its Component Development Manufacturing Center. Steve Hanson, who previously headed the Motorola group from Geneva, Switzerland, becomes president, with Jim Thorburn, previously chief financial officer at Zilog Inc (another Texas Pacific Group investment) as senior VP and chief operating officer.
ON will begin operations by producing six-inch wafers at 0.35 micron process technology for TMOS power devices, although ON Says the site, built by Motorola in 1994 for communications devices, is capable of producing a broad range of advanced semiconductors. TMOS devices provide power regulation for battery chargers and power switching in control systems. Motorola was previously producing its TMOS products in Mesa, Arizona, but ON will move the operation over in January 2000.
According to Bill George, chief manufacturing and technology officer for the company, ON will pursue a low cost manufacturing strategy, moving manufacturing from four-inch to six-inch wafers and switching to submicron processes. ON has joint ventures with Leshan in China for small signal products, Roznov in the Czech Republic for raw silicon wafers and low-cost analog technologies, and Piestany in Slovakia for TMOS and metal gate logic families. Last year, the company shipped 15bn units of analog, logic and discrete semiconductor components worth $1.5bn in sales. Projections for this year are 18bn units. The unit has over 600 patents, but has signed a cross-licensing agreement with Motorola to share them.
