Bosch is proving that Germany is still a competitive production location by investing EUR550m in building a new plant to produce semi-conductors at its site in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, creating 800 jobs by 2012.
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The plant will produce 200mm semi-conductors from mid-2009. Construction is scheduled to begin in the autumn of 2007.
The plant will have a total capacity of up to 1,000 silicon wafers per day, equivalent to a daily production volume of up to one million microchips.
“In investing heavily in state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, we are securing the long-term future of our international automotive electronics business,” said Franz Fehrenbach, chairman of the Bosch board of management.
Bosch has been manufacturing 150-millimeter (six-inch) semiconductors in Reutlingen for 10 years. The location can therefore draw on a wealth of expertise and has a good infrastructure.
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By GlobalDataSemiconductor and micromachined chips from Reutlingen are mainly used in the automotive industry. As components in electronic control units, they form the “central nervous system” of many functions in the vehicle, including electronic safety systems such as ABS, ESP, or airbags, fuel-efficient and clean engines with electronic engine management, or modern driver assistance systems. On average, between 100 and 200 application-specific microchips are installed in a middle or luxury-class car.
“We anticipate that the semiconductor market for automotive applications will grow by an average of 10% per year in the medium term,” said Bernd Bohr, chairman of the automotive group.
In addition, the company is opening up additional marketing channels, especially in consumer electronics, via its recently founded subsidiary Bosch Sensortec.
Although the plant will employ 800 people, the company will be able to cover most of its requirements for qualified personnel internally – drawing especially on staff from a nearby facility.
The new 200-millimetre wafer plant in Reutlingen will mainly be geared to the “smart power process.” In this technology, integrated circuits combine on one chip highly sensitive signal processing and high-voltage circuits for the control of high-performance actuators. These chips have to work reliably even under the especially tough thermal and mechanical loads experienced during automobile operation. The technology applied here uses ultra-fine structures, which are deposited on the chips. In the initial stages, these structures will be 0.35 micrometres wide – far less than one hundredth of the diameter of a human hair. At a later stage, Bosch plans to halve structure width to 0.18 micrometres. Precision such as this makes extremely high demands of manufacturing technology, according to Bosch.
In addition, MEMS technologies are also to be rolled out in the 200-millimetre wafer plant, manufacturing micromechanical sensors that are used above all in the automobile, but also in mobile phones, handhelds, or games consoles. With this move, Bosch is ensuring that it will be able to draw on the most advanced manufacturing technology in this growth market for many years to come.
Reutlingen is where the Bosch automotive electronics division is based, and is its most important development and manufacturing site for a large number of electronic components. The site is of great importance within the global manufacturing network as a pilot plant for innovative products such as driver assistance systems. Bosch employs a total of roughly 7,000 people at three sites in Reutlingen, including 240 apprentices undergoing technical and commercial vocational training.
