Kulicke & Soffa Expands China Manufacturing Operation

In addition to its existing capillary and cantilever probe card product lines, the K&S Suzhou plant now produces blades and sockets to offer a fuller range of manufacturing capability. The facility has dedicated over 20,000 square feet in its existing plant to both of these new product lines. Additionally, K&S has invested nearly $8 million U.S. dollars in new equipment and technology to make both of these new China manufacturing lines state-of-the-art in unit output and quality.

Oded Lendner, K&S Senior Vice president, Package Test Business Unit, states, "As our test socket business in Asia continues to grow faster each year, we need to be closer to our main customer base. With our total investment in the new test socket manufacturing line in Suzhou, we can exceed the growing local demand in China and the Pacific Rim." This new "full-line" manufacturing capability will now be the largest K&S facility of all it test socket manufacturing sites.

Jack Belani, Senior Vice President, K&S Corporate Marketing and Ball Bonding, explains, "To further expand our blade market share and overall customer satisfaction, we decided to move our blade manufacturing hub to China. Our new manufacturing plant offers increased capacity and faster cycle times to meet our growing customer base."

The K&S Suzhou facility will now have over 1,000 employees, with room to grow. Additionally, K&S China plans to strengthen and grow its technical application capabilities and engineering expertise to further support the local Chinese semiconductor market growth.



About K&S
Kulicke & Soffa (NASDAQ: KLIC) is the world's leading supplier of semiconductor wire bonding assembly equipment. K&S is the only major supplier to the semiconductor assembly industry that provides customers with semiconductor wire bonding equipment along with the complementing packaging materials and test interconnect products that actually contact the surface of the customer's semiconductor devices. The ability to control all of these assembly related products is unique to Kulicke & Soffa, and allows us to develop system solutions to the new technology challenges inherent in assembling and packaging next-generation semiconductor devices. Test interconnect products include a variety of wafer probe cards, ATE interface assemblies, and ATE boards for wafer testing, as well as test sockets for all types of packaged semiconductor devices. Kulicke & Soffa's web site address is http://www.kns.com.