ON DISPLAY

Moto FPD fab to open

Motorola is preparing to ramp up production at its new $100-million flat-panel display plant in Tempe, AZ. Phased-in equipment installation begins this month at the facility, which houses a three-story fab containing 34,000 sq ft of Class 10,000 to Class 10 cleanroom area and a subfab for process utilities. The four-building site will serve as a headquarters and R&D facility for the chipmaker's FPD division.

Motorola has licensed display technology developed in France and will use it to manufacture FPDs for pagers, automobiles, and desktop computers, according to McCarthy, the general contractor on the project. The architect/ engineer was Quaser Engineering of Phoenix.

PST automates dpiX

Progressive System Technologies (PST) of Austin, TX, has received an order from dpiX of Palo Alto, CA, for automation and isolation equipment worth more than $1 million. The subsidiary of Xerox purchased two programmable substrate sorters, minienvironments, and related tools for automating process equipment. The tools will be used to manufacture display screens to be sold to the U.S. Department of Defense for jet fighters and to hospitals as replacements for x-ray film, PST says.

FSI unit sells cluster tools

FSI International has made first-time sales of Apex microlithography cluster tools to two unnamed U.S.-based display manufacturers. One of the customers will use the Apex photoresist processing tool to manufacture large-area glass substrates for production of thin CRTs to be installed in laptop computers. The second client is manufacturing field-emission displays. The cluster tool is made by Semiconductor Systems, a fully owned subsidiary of FSI, and costs between $1 million and $1.6 million.