MXIM: Maxim Opts to Buy, Rather Than Build, Capacity

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

From William Trent, CFA of Stock Market Beat

Maxim Announces Acquisition of Wafer Fab Facility in Irving, Texas:

Maxim Integrated Products, Inc., (MXIM) announced thatit has acquired a wafer fabrication facility in Irving, Texas fromAtmel for approximately $38 million. The facility, located onapproximately 39 acres, is comprised of approximately 622,000 squarefeet of clean room and office space. Approximately 60,000 square feetis currently clean room space with the capability of expanding to100,000 square feet.

$38 million is far less than the cost to build a new fabricationplant. Because the analog chips made by Maxim do not require the latestand greatest in semiconductor equipment, Maxim is able to buy itsfacilities from the cutting edge manufacturers who can no longer makeuse of them.

Vijay Ullal, Group President at Maxim, commented, “Thisfacility puts us in an excellent position for future capacityrequirements. It is capable of 20,000 eight inch wafer starts per monthwith the capability of expanding to over 30,000 wafer starts per month.The scale and construction of this facility will enable Maxim to bringon line capacity down to the 0.18um node with low cost and short cycletime with high yields.”

Most of the memory chips and other cutting-edge facilities are using12-inch wafers and 0.06um geometries. While such manufacturers find thefacility ancient, Maxim is able to swoop in and bring it a new lease onlife. In our experience, Maxim’s fab purchases have typically generatedsolid return on investment.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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