Air Liquide Electronics and Hynix reinforce their partnership in Asia

MP3 players, digital cameras, cellular phones, gaming devices, USB keys…

All these daily electronic consumer products use NAND Flash Memory for data storage. To keep up with the increasing demand for those products, Hynix Semiconductor Inc, a global leader in the memory industry, is extending its Chinese and South Korean fabs’ capacities in order to meet the booming demand.

In China, Air Liquide is expanding its long term carrier gas agreement with the Hynix-Numonyx B.V. joint-venture at its giant wafer fab in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, 100 kilometers from Shanghai. In order to fulfill the rapidly increasing demand in ultra pure nitrogen, Air Liquide China will invest in two Ultra High Purity Nitrogen (HPN) generators as well as expand the oxygen, argon, hydrogen, helium and compressed dry air supply to the Hynix-Numonyx 300-mm wafer fabs dedicated to NAND flash memories. The total investment will be around €35 million.

In South Korea, Hynix has also renewed its confidence by choosing Air Liquide as its partner for the equipment and installation of bulk electronics specialty gas dispensing systems for its new 300 mm fab located in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, about 130 km south-east of Seoul.

These two successes are perfectly aligned with the global partnership in which Air Liquide supplies Hynix in Eugene, Oregon (United States), Icheon and Cheongju (South Korea), and Wuxi (China).

Said M.C. Kim, Vice-President and Chief Procurement Officer of Hynix Semiconductor: “These increases in capacity are in line with our strategy to expand our 300 mm output and to maximize our production efficiency. Air Liquide is a long time partner which has already supported our projects throughout the world. Its reliability and efficiency have stood the test of time and we are delighted to collaborate with them again on this project.”
Christophe Fontaine, Vice-President Electronics of Air Liquide, declared: “Our long term relationship with Hynix allows us to fully understand our customer’s requirements and expectations and we are very excited to work with them on those projects. We always provide Hynix with state of the art solutions at competitive prices and it is our pleasure to be able to accompany and support our Korean partner’s growth in new countries.”

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (Hynix) of Icheon, South Korea, is the world’s top tier memory semiconductor supplier offering Dynamic Random Access Memory chips (“DRAMs”) and Flash memory chips to a wide range of established international customers. The company’s shares are traded on the Korea Stock Exchange, and the Global Depository shares are listed on the Luxemburg Stock Exchange. www.hynix.com.

Numonyx designs and manufactures a full complement of integrated NOR, NAND and Phase Change non-volatile memory technologies and products to meet the increasingly sophisticated needs of customers in the cellular and embedded markets. Numonyx combines the technology and manufacturing expertise of the flash memory divisions of Intel Corporation and STMicroelectronics, and is dedicated to providing high density, low power memory technologies and packaging solutions to a global base of customers. www.numonyx.com.