16 M DRAM manufacturing cooperation IBM/SIEMENS in Corbeil Essonnes in France

This paper describes a manufacturing alliance between IBM and SIEMENS; an 8-inch Advanced Semiconductor Line (ACL) in Corbeil Essonnes, France. This facility, 40 km south of Paris, is jointly operated by these two companies. A separate legal entity hasn´t been established . The relationship is based on a cooperation agreement. Both partners share the investment, spending and output of the ACL on a 50/50 basis with no majority stake-holder. After an initially difficult start-up period, excellent technical and business results were achieved in the project, which enabled the two companies to add additional investment and ramp the line to a level of more than 6,000 200 mm wafer starts per week. Approximately 1 billion US$ were invested in total. This paper describes the challenges during the start-up phase of this venture. In short, it was necessary to change the “mind set” of the two companies´ management teams in conjunction with providing sufficient time for the two engineering organizations, originating from two distinct corporate cultures, to learn how to work effectively together in this venture. The organization which resulted from these changes enabled a rapid pay-back of the initial investment and led, ultimately, to a very powerful technical and business team. This team currently produces very satisfactory business results and is one of the world leaders in low-cost, high quality 16 Mb DRAM manufacturing