Fairfield County”™s largest high-tech employer could play a major role in Intel Corp.”™s $6 billion plan to upgrade four U.S. plants to produce chips with circuitry etched at 22 nanometers.
ASML Holding N.V. shipped its first machine that can handle circuitry at that scale. Last spring, a Barclays Capital analyst said that ASML would likely split any contract to provide Intel with 22-nanometer machines with Nikon Corp.
In the third quarter, ASML global revenue totaled $1.6 billion, more than double the company”™s total of a year earlier; and the company earned $372 million. The average selling price for an ASML semiconductor lithography machine is more than $30 million.
ASML is the largest high-tech employer in Fairfield County with more than 600 employees at last report in Wilton, one of two U.S. production plants along with a larger facility in Tempe, Ariz. As of mid-October, the Wilton location listed just two job openings.
“(It) is not a secret that we are at capacity,” said Eric Meurice, CEO of ASML, in a conference call with investment analysts in mid-October. “We expect to be out of this problem ”¦ (by) next year, because we are, in fact, building a lot of new capacity.”
The company is currently producing two iterations of its latest “extreme” ultraviolet lithography machines, including the 3300 model intended for general production that can spit out 125 wafers an hour at 20-nanometer resolution.
“That”™s the one that will be ramping production,” Meurice said. “Customers want it early in 2012, because it would probably ramp production during 2013, so they need about nine months to ”¦ qualify the 3300 for production.”
In September, Gartner Inc. estimated that global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment would increase 120 percent from 2009 to reach $36.9 billion this year, tailing off to just under 5 percent growth in 2011.
“The strong semiconductor growth in 2010 has driven semiconductor capital growth to all-time highs ”¦ due to strong spending by the foundry and logic segments, along with a technology upgrade for the memory manufacturers. In 2011,” said Klaus Rinnen, managing vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement.
IBM Corp. registered mostly across-the-board increases in profits and revenue in the third quarter ”“ and barely missed an increase in its outsourcing contract signings after completing a large deal just after the quarter ended. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM is the largest employer in the lower Hudson Valley, and has a large number of workers who live in Fairfield County.
Third quarter profits totaled $3.6 billion, up 12 percent, as IBM revenue increased 3 percent to $24.3 billion. The company”™s systems and technology division performed best with a 10.4 percent increase in revenue.
For its part, Intel realized record revenue and operating profits in the third quarter, with sales up 18 percent from a year ago to $11.1 billion. Even as the company readies for the launch of 32-nanometer “Sandy Bridge” chips in the first quarter next year, it has dubbed the 22-nanometer chip line “Ivy Bridge” as they enter development.
“We are seeing a good mix to the high end of products, and as I think about the implications of Sandy Bridge coming into that mix, you can always be optimistic because it looks to be a great product based on what we are hearing from the customers,” said Stacy Smith, chief financial officer of Intel, in an October conference call. “We have been hard at work at this, and I think the factories have done an outstanding job in bringing their productivity up, their efficiency up, their cost structure up.”
