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TowerJazz to acquire semiconductor factories in Japan

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Harmeet
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MIGDAL HAEMEK, ISRAEL: TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader today jointly announced with Panasonic Corp., the signing of a definitive agreement to create a joint venture (JV) to manufacture Panasonic's products.

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Within the scope of the JV, Panasonic will transfer its semiconductor manufacturing process and capacity tools of 8 inch and 12 inch wafers at its Hokuriku factories (Uozu, Tonami and Arai) to the JV, committing to acquire its products from the JV for a long term period of at least five years of volume production, and will transfer to TowerJazz 51 percent of the shares of this JV.

Following this transaction, TowerJazz will rationalize its Japanese business, which may include fab consolidations between TowerJazz's Nishiwaki facility and the JV's facilities, and to this end, TowerJazz is evaluating potential ventures for the Nishiwaki facility.

The JV will continue the production of Panasonic's semiconductor processes as Panasonic's subcontractor as well as seek to expand operations by leveraging TowerJazz's customers and businesses to capture out-of-group sales.

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The JV is expected to increase TowerJazz's technology offerings by providing multiple additional specialty flows, including Panasonic's world-class specialty flows such as High Definition FSI - a world famous CIS (CMOS Image Sensor) benchmark technology for high quantum efficiency, low dark current CIS technology, and high voltage SOI (silicon-on-insulator) based power management technologies.

High Definition FSI is a unique technology that enables the use of front side illumination (FSI) even for small pixels, where usually, an expensive backside illumination (BSI) is being widely used in the industry. High Definition FSI consists of light separation walls combined with a light pipe structure that funnels the light into the individual pixels with minimal light loss. This technology provides high sensitivity (high quantum efficiency) to light, low sensitivity to different angles of light that helps in preventing shading at the periphery of the image and excellent color separation leading to true and vivid colors.

The dark current performance CIS technology is known to be one of the best in the industry, not only in the average very low values of dark currents even at elevated temperatures, but also with extremely small tail of high dark current pixels, known as "bright pixels". As a result, Panasonic technology allows excellent images at low light conditions (night) with no bright pixels in the image. This technology is well suited for high end DSLR (digital single lens reflex) type cameras.

Production of High Voltage SOI technology from Panasonic immediately extends TowerJazz's BCD (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) offering from 80V to 190V enabling entry into new display driver, industrial and medical markets previously not accessible. The technology includes a low-Rds(on) integrated IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor) to enable efficient high-voltage drivers, 5V CMOS for integration of digital and analog functions, SOI substrates for virtually perfect signal isolation, and thick Cu layers for low-loss interconnects.

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