New Singapore Site: Global Hub for Manufacturing Semiconductor Equipment

Today the new 32,000-square-meter Singapore Operations Center, Applied’s first facility in Asia for manufacturing semiconductor equipment, opened and will serve as the company’s hub for semiconductor equipment manufacturing around the world, as well as support worldwide supply chain operations and other corporate functions.

Last October, Applied opened its advanced solar research and demonstration facility in Xi’an, China. More recently, the company launched its expanded Tainan Manufacturing Center in Tainan, Taiwan, enhancing Applied’s ability to serve its flat panel display and thin film solar customers.

The Singapore Operations Center was designed to meet stringent environmental standards, but I wanted to callout some of the impressive top level specifications:

• The center was recently awarded Singapore’s highest environmental honor – the Green Mark Platinum award – by the Singapore Building and Construction Authority.
• The center features the largest thin film solar system in Singapore, a 400 kilowatt peak system that annually generates 450 megawatt hours of electricity – enough energy to power more than 100 apartments for a year.
• This system uses 5.7-square-meter PV solar panels, the most powerful in the world, that have been manufactured on a customer’s Applied SunFab thin film line.
• Other fixtures include
  
  • low-e glass windows
    
  • "green" curtain walls
  • a rainwater recycling system
  • built-in solar sky lights.
• These and other features are expected to result in energy savings of up to 30 percent.

The Singapore Operations Center is another key step in expanding Applied’s capabilities in Asia as our customers continue to expand their operations in the region because markets for chip-based consumer products are exploding in China, India and elsewhere nearby.