GLOBALFOUNDRIES names new VP and GM for Dresden semiconductor fab

MILPITAS, USA & DRESDEN, GERMANY: GLOBALFOUNDRIES announced the appointment of Dr. Rutger Wijburg as vice president and general manager of “Fab 1,” the company’s Germany-based semiconductor manufacturing facility, as of October 2011. Wijburg will report to Kay Chai Ang, senior vice president, 300mm fab operations, who has been leading the Dresden fab on an interim basis.

Wijburg comes to GLOBALFOUNDRIES from NXP Semiconductors, formerly Philips Semiconductors, where he held executive and senior management positions in worldwide manufacturing, operations and engineering over a 20-plus year career. Most recently, he was senior vice president and general manager of manufacturing operations and worldwide real estate and facilities. He managed multiple wafer fabs on three continents.

“Given his global fab and operations experience, Rutger will be a tremendous asset to GLOBALFOUNDRIES as we continue to transform and accelerate our growth to be the leading global, independent semiconductor manufacturer,” said Ajit Manocha, CEO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “He has a proven track record of achieving operational excellence and driving technology development. Moreover, he brings to our global team the value-add of the customer perspective with respect to product quality, time-to-market, and time-to-volume.”

Wijburg will lead the Dresden fab that has more than 3,000 employees and is in the middle of an intense multi-billion dollar ramp up of manufacturing capacity and technology development that includes a new state-of-the-art, 52,000-square-meter clean room. Fab 1 currently produces wafers based on 45/40-, 32- and 28-nanometer technologies for a diverse global customer base. This makes GLOBALFOUNDRIES an important player of the micro- and nano-electronics clusters of “Silicon Saxony.”

The Saxon semiconductor manufacturing facility is part of a worldwide network of GLOBALFOUNDRIES fabs that include plants in Singapore and Saratoga County, New York. In total, the two-year-old company has more than 11,000 employees worldwide.