No review of the local electronics industry would be complete without mention of SAMES. The only commercial semiconductor manufacturing industry in Africa, it was initially established back in 1979 for strategic purposes.
Since then the company has undergone a number of setbacks including various changes in ownership although it now seems to have attained stability as a wholly-owned subsidiary of JSE-listed Labat Africa.
The company offers a range of proprietary products in a number of market segments, customer-specific integrated circuits and foundry services. The ISO 9000-certified manufacturing facility has a 1400 m2 Class 1 clean room and its 150 mm wafer processing line has a capacity of 1000 starts per week with feature sizes for CMOS in the range of one to two microns, and 1,2 microns for the more recently-introduced E2PROM process.
Standard ASICs address the fields of energy measurement, telecommunications and ID and security, these all having been driven initially by the requirements of the local electronics industry. SAMES is in fact a world leader in the supply of ICs for solid state electricity metering applications supplying both single, three phase and multipurpose devices. The company has more than 20 years experience in the design and manufacture of ICs for telecoms applications and products include simple diallers and single chip devices. In the security and ID sectors, the company offers a number of RFID devices for various applications.
In terms of customer-specific ICs, SAMES has extensive experience and can interface with the customer at any stage in the design process with a complete integrated design capability being also on offer. While custom devices are often thought to be very expensive, SAMES offers a low cost solution for prototype ASICs with their frequent multiproject wafer runs. This service allows the cost of the wafer runs to be spread over many customers, consolidating a number of designs to be manufactured on the same wafer.
While originally established to satisfy the needs of the local industry, particularly telecommunications, the company has expanded its capability to the point where it exports over 90% of its production to some 35 countries worldwide through a well-established network of agents and distributors. Particularly in the field of energy measurement the company is in a dominant position.
This series looks at some of the leading companies in the electronics industry in South Africa today. To simplify presentation and avoid perceptions that they are being 'rated' in any way, this coverage is being presented in alphabetical order. Do not miss the next issue of Dataweek where we look at a company with a major export focus in automotive electronics.
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