Alliances

Since its birth, ST has been a pioneer in building strategic alliances and has a proven track record in developing successful relationships with customers, suppliers, competitors, universities, research institutions and European research programs. Increasingly, strategic alliances and industry partnerships are becoming more important to success in the semiconductor industry.

ST has entered into several strategic alliances with customers, including Alcatel, Bosch, Hewlett-Packard, Marelli, Nokia, Nortel, Pioneer, Seagate, Siemens VDO, Thomson, and Western Digital, among others. Customer alliances provide ST with valuable systems and application know-how and access to markets for key products, while allowing its customers to share some of the risks of product development and to gain access to ST’s process technologies and manufacturing infrastructure. ST is now actively working to capitalize on its experience and the breadth of its technology portfolio to expand the number of its customer alliances, targeting top-tier OEMs in the United States, Europe, and in Asia.

While continuing to compete vigorously for sales, partnerships with other semiconductor industry manufacturers permit ST to multiply its investment in costly research and development and manufacturing resources to mutual advantage for technology development.

ST, a longtime leader in wireless technologies, began working with Texas Instruments in 2002 to jointly define and promote an open standard for wireless application-processor interfaces. This initiative has now broadened to more companies and is known as the MIPI Alliance, with ST, ARM, Nokia, and Texas Instruments as founding members. The Alliance now includes over 92 members that collaborate as mobile industry leaders with the objective of defining and promoting open standards for interfaces to mobile application processors.

Non-Volatile Memory is a strategic product segment for ST. In this field, ST has been cooperating with Hynix for four years on a joint development program for NAND Flash technology and products. And for NOR Flash, a strategic alliance has been established with Intel on product specifications for wireless applications. Additionally, a recent agreement has been established with Freescale, for the joint development of microcontrollers with embedded Flash, in the 90nm technology generation.

ST has also established joint development programs with leading suppliers such as Air Liquide, Applied Materials, ASM Lithography, Axalto, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, KLA-Tencor, LAM Research, MEMC, Teradyne, and Wacker in addition to leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool producers, including Cadence, CoWare, and Synopsys.

In joint R&D programs, ST also participates in collaborative European research programs, such as MEDEA+, the pan-European program for advanced co-operative research and development in microelectronics technology and its applications, and ITEA 2 (Information Technology for European Advancement), the strategic pan-European program for advanced pre-competitive R&D for software-intensive systems and services. ST is also playing a leading role in two of the recently created European Technology Platforms: ENIAC (European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council), which was set up to provide the strategic research agenda for Nanoelectronics, and ARTEMIS (Advanced Research and Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems), which plays a similar role for Embedded Systems. Additionally, ST cooperates with many universities around the world, including those in Europe, the US, and China, and major research institutions, such as CEA-Leti and IMEC.

In manufacturing, in 1998, ST inaugurated its back-end assembly and test plant in Shenzhen, China, which operates as part of a joint-venture agreement between ST and Shenzhen High Tech Industrial Company Ltd (SHIC). In 2004, ST signed and announced a joint venture agreement with Hynix to build a front-end memory-manufacturing facility in Wuxi City, China. The joint venture is an extension of the NAND Flash Process/product joint development relationship between the companies and will feature a 200-mm wafer production line planned to begin production at the end of 2006 and a 300-mm wafer production line planned to begin production in 2007.