NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR ANNOUNCES GRAND OPENING OF ITS SOUTH PORTLAND, MAINE FACILITY

June 27, 1997 -- National Semiconductor Corporation® today announced the opening of its 200 mm fab in South Portland, Maine. The $932 million facility is the largest industrial investment in Maine’s history.

The 575,000 square foot manufacturing site will produce 8-inch wafers with .35 micron circuit geometries, with the capability of producing .25 micron technology by mid 1998. The fab will employ 900 people when fully operational. Typical applications for the integrated circuits (ICs) produced at the fab will include personal computers, laptop computers and cellular phones.

Groundbreaking began in November 1995 and first full-flow process characterization was completed in April 1997, which is best-in-class performance. "We were able to get the fab up and running in 18 months due to the successful technology transfer from our Advanced Technology Group in California, where all of National’s fab processes are piloted," said Project Director Paul Edmonds. "Our yields were better than expected. Usually, we expect only working transistors the first time through, but we were surprised and got working ICs instead."

The new fab utilizes standard mechanical interface (SMIF) technology, which enables wafer transfer without exposure to potential contaminants. Typically in conventional cleanrooms, wafers are manually carried in cassettes by workers, exposing the wafers to air. The SMIF process, however, isolates the wafers from air because the wafers are transported and stored in special pods. Robotic devices mechanically extract the cassettes of wafers from the pods and load them into production equipment. A SMIF "mini-environment" maintains sterile surroundings for the wafers while they are being processed.

National's new fab is built on a workcell design, which is a cross functional set-up with both strong vertical and horizontal work processes. Many fabs are typically organized in a horizontal, hierarchical management structure, with section managers’ attentions being pulled in several directions. In contrast, the workcell design optimizes efficiency by laying out the fab floor so that all equipment needed from the beginning to the end of wafer production is grouped together rather than spread out across the floor.

"Our new fab in South Portland is consistent with National's strategic imperatives of state-of-the-art process technology and world class manufacturing," said National CEO Brian Halla. "This facility enables National to put systems on a chip for our key trendsetting data highway partners."

National Semiconductor Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, produces system on a chip silicon solutions for the information highway, based on its leadership in analog and mixed signal technologies. National is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and focuses on the communications, personal systems and consumer markets. National has annual sales of approximately $2 billion and 12,000 employees worldwide. Additional company and product information is available on the World Wide Web at www.national.com.