Hanking offers MEMS foundry services
Work was started on the fab and MEMS packaging facilities back in 2012, and Hanking remains China’s first 200mm MEMS wafer fab. The company now makes a number of inertial measurement units (IMUs) as well as offering MEMS design and foundry services. Hanking Electronics acquired the inertial sensor business, product lines and associated patents from Maxim Integrated Products in 2016. Maxim had obtained them when it bought Austrian company SensorDynamics AG in 2011, but made the decision to exit the consumer MEMS business in 2015.
The MEMS wafer fab is 500,000 square meter facility set in 51 hectares of land. Its process capabilities cover those needed for MEMS pressure sensors, accelerometers, gyrocopses, flow sensors and custom services are available for foundry customers. Hanking has an R&D center in Cleveland Ohio and engineering teams in Milan and Pisa, Italy.
Hanking is not making explicit the production capacity of its wafer fab or the mix of own-brand to foundry wafers. Back in 2012 when the fab construction was starting the parent company pledged to spend about $475 million across three phases of development there.
The first phase was due to enable production of 4,000 wafer starts per month. These would be 200mm-diameter wafers although the building was intended to be capable of running 300mm-diameter wafers.
SensorDynamics held numerous patents for MEMS sensor technology and had devoted more than 800 man‐years of research and development to the high‐growth fields of MEMS sensors and associated low-power interface and wireless connectivity solutions.
The acquisition has enabled Hanking to expand into automotive and high-end consumer markets. It also explains the presence of a Hanking Electronics office in Graz, Austria.
Hanking is also a primary example of China’s long-term approach to entering semiconductor component manufacturing where it has for many years had to import components and run a large deficit.
Next: Senior executives
The senior executives at Hanking Electronics have been there since the start of the Hanking’s MEMS journey. They are CEO Lucy Huang and CTO Doug Sparks.
Sparks began the distribution of the Multi-User MEMS Processes (MUMPS) in China through Hanking as a means of access and education. MUMPS is a system of standardized process modules that enables the sharing of wafer area by multiple customers, similar to multiproject wafer (MPW) runs in CMOS. The MUMPS program was originally developed at the University of California Berkeley in the 1980s but ended up being administered by Memscap SA (Bernin, France).
Sparks also led the acquisition of the inertial MEMS business assets from Maxim, including 3dof and 6dof IMUs, which are now in manufacture and offered for automotive, mobile communications, drones, IoT, virtual reality systems, medical devices, and industrial robotics.
Hanking does not appear in the top 19 MEMS foundries for 2017 as listed by Yole Developpement implying that annual sales at Hanking remained below about $5 million per year up until then.
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Maxim exits consumer MEMS, touch sensors
Maxim takes over MEMS expert SensorDynamics
MEMS foundry ranking reflects volatile market
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