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~9 min read · 2,109 words ·updated 2026-04-29 · confidence 71%

Newport Beach + Maxim — Tower’s North American 200mm fab footprint

Updated: 2026-04-29 Status: ✓ Verified via Tower IR press releases, the original 2016 TowerJazz / Maxim 8-K disclosure, the May 2008 Tower-Jazz merger announcement, the September 5, 2023 Intel-Tower foundry agreement press release, Tower’s history page, and the 2024 fiscal-year Form 20-F. Items flagged ⚠ are absent from primary sources or aggregator-level only. Cross-references: Technology overview · PH18 process · Tower-ST Agrate 300mm · overview

0. Provenance note — clarifying the seed brief framing

The seed-brief framing of “2023 acquisition of the Maxim Integrated 8-inch line at Newport Beach (acquired from Analog Devices after ADI’s Maxim merger)” is factually inaccurate. ⚠

What actually happened:

  1. Tower’s Newport Beach fab is Fab 3 — acquired in the May 2008 Tower-Jazz Semiconductor stock-for-stock merger, not from Maxim, and not in 2023 (Tower history ✓; Wikipedia: Jazz Semiconductor ◐).
  2. Tower’s Maxim acquisition was Fab 9 in San Antonio, Texas, not Newport Beach — closed February 2016 for ~$40M (paid in approximately 3.3 million TowerJazz ordinary shares) plus a 15-year supply agreement under which TowerJazz manufactures products for Maxim (TowerJazz / Maxim closing announcement, 2016-02-02 ✓; PR Newswire mirror ✓).
  3. The actual 2023 Tower fab-asset event was the Intel Foundry Services agreement, not a Maxim acquisition — announced September 5, 2023, weeks after the August 2023 Intel acquisition of Tower collapsed. Tower committed up to $300M of capex to install equipment in Intel’s Fab 11X in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, opening a 300mm capacity corridor of over 600,000 photo layers per month (Tower IR, 2023-09-05 ✓; TechCrunch ✓; The Register ✓).
  4. Analog Devices is not a counterparty to any Tower fab transaction. ADI completed its Maxim Integrated merger in August 2021, so post-2021 Maxim assets were ADI assets — but the only public Tower-Maxim fab transaction is the 2016 San Antonio deal, well before ADI bought Maxim, and there has been no subsequent ADI-Tower fab transaction.

This file documents the actual Tower North American fab history and the actual 2023 Intel-Tower foundry agreement. The seed brief’s framing has been corrected and the file structured around what is verifiable from primary sources.

1. Fab 3 — Newport Beach, California

1.1 Origin: the May 2008 Tower-Jazz merger

Tower acquired the Newport Beach 200mm fab via the May 2008 stock-for-stock merger with Jazz Technologies / Jazz Semiconductor. Jazz had been spun out of Conexant (formerly Rockwell Semiconductor) in 2002 as a specialty foundry focused on RF, SiGe BiCMOS, BCD power, and high-voltage processes. In the post-merger entity, Jazz Semiconductor was renamed Tower Semiconductor Newport Beach, Inc. (“NPB Co.”) and operated as a wholly-owned subsidiary (Tower history ✓; Wikipedia: Jazz Semiconductor ◐).

1.2 What the Newport Beach line produces

CapabilityNotes
SiGe BiCMOS (180 nm-class)The legacy Jazz strength; carries the TS18SL / SBC18S5 driver / TIA process flows that pair with PH18 photonic dies for transceiver builds
PH18 silicon photonicsTower’s productized 200mm SiPh — see PH18 process
RF CMOSMobile front-end module IC manufacturing
BCD powerHigh-voltage power-management ICs
Image-sensor flowsSpecialty CMOS image sensors
MEMSMicro-electro-mechanical-systems flows

The Newport Beach line is the photonics-load-bearing fab in Tower’s footprint. PH18 is hosted exclusively at Newport Beach Fab 3. The November 2024 productization of Tower’s new 300mm SiPh process at Migdal Haemek (Israel) — see PH18 process §1 — preserves the 200mm Newport Beach line as the higher-volume and lower-cost SiPh path, with the 300mm process serving as the larger-die / higher-density complement.

1.3 Strategic significance

For the AI-photonics scope:

  • Newport Beach is the carrier of the LWLG Perkinamine integration under the March 11, 2026 development agreement ✓ (the Perkinamine polymer is dropped into PH18 slot waveguides at Newport Beach)
  • Newport Beach is the carrier of the Coherent OFC 2026 silicon-MZM 420 Gb/s PAM4 demonstration ✓
  • Newport Beach is the carrier of the 2021 Tower-Scintil JDA on integrated-laser-on-Si ✓

2. Fab 9 — San Antonio, Texas (the Maxim asset)

2.1 Deal terms

ElementDetailSource
CounterpartyMaxim Integrated Products, Inc.TowerJazz close announcement, 2016-02-02 ✓
Asset8-inch (200mm) wafer fabrication facility, San Antonio, TexasPR Newswire mirror ✓
Closing dateFebruary 2, 2016TowerJazz close announcement ✓
Purchase consideration~$40M paid via approximately 3.3 million ordinary TowerJazz shares (stock-only)TowerJazz close announcement ✓
Wafer capacity added~28,000 wafers per monthsemiconductor-today, 2016-03-02 ✓
Long-term supply agreement15-year LTA — TowerJazz manufactures products for Maxim, with gradual ramp of third-party productsTowerJazz close announcement ✓
Designation in Tower fleetFab 9 (Tower’s ninth fab counting Israel + Newport Beach + TPSCo Japan)Tower IR ✓

The deal is structurally stock-for-fab plus take-or-pay — Tower gave up ~3.3M shares (low-double-digit-millions of dollars market value at the time) and committed to a 15-year supply LTA that anchored the fab utilization at Maxim-product volumes for the early ramp. Tower’s net-cash impact was therefore minimal; the value-creating mechanism was (a) monetizing fab utilization on Maxim’s existing legacy products, and (b) ramping third-party customers into the freed capacity over the 15-year window.

2.2 What the San Antonio line had been producing

Before the Tower acquisition, the San Antonio 8-inch line was producing legacy Maxim Integrated analog products — power-management ICs, mixed-signal analog, sensor interface chips. ⚠ Specific product-family disclosure was not part of the 2016 transaction announcement; Maxim’s product lines on the line at closing are only summarized at a category level.

Post-acquisition, the line was integrated into Tower’s broader specialty-analog footprint — adding capacity for Tower’s RF, BCD, and analog mixed-signal flows and serving the LTA-anchored Maxim products in parallel.

2.3 Integration into Tower’s North American 200mm

The 2016 Maxim deal expanded Tower’s North American 200mm capacity from Newport Beach Fab 3 alone to Newport Beach Fab 3 + San Antonio Fab 9 — a structural change in Tower’s geographic risk profile. With both California and Texas 200mm sites, Tower had US manufacturing redundancy across two states and two grid systems, plus near-shore proximity to North American customer engineering teams.

San Antonio’s process flows do not include silicon photonics. PH18 remains a Newport-Beach-only process. The San Antonio line carries the broader RF / BCD / analog mixed-signal portfolio that Tower’s customers tape out across their non-photonic IC needs. ◐

3. The September 2023 Intel-Tower foundry agreement

3.1 Background — the collapsed Intel acquisition

Intel announced in February 2022 an agreement to acquire Tower for $5.4 billion (~$53/share cash) (Intel announcement, 2022-02-15 ◐). The deal was abandoned on August 16, 2023 after failing to clear China State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) antitrust review. Intel paid Tower a $353M reverse-termination fee as part of the abandonment settlement (Tower IR, 2023-08-16 ✓).

3.2 The September 5, 2023 follow-on agreement

Three weeks after the abandonment, on September 5, 2023, Intel and Tower announced a follow-on foundry agreement — preserving the operational substance of the original transaction (Tower customer access to Intel 300mm capacity) without the equity-acquisition wrapper:

ElementDetailSource
Announcement dateSeptember 5, 2023Tower IR ✓
Tower investmentUp to $300M in equipment + fixed assetsTower IR ✓
Intel facilityFab 11X, Rio Rancho, New MexicoThe Register ✓
Capacity corridorOver 600,000 photo layers per monthTower IR ✓
Wafer size300 mmTower IR ✓
Process targetsTower’s 65 nm power-management BCD + RF SOI flowsTechCrunch ✓
Process qualification targetFull process-flow qualification planned in 2024TechCrunch ✓

Key structural difference vs Agrate: Tower owns its equipment in Fab 11X (same model as Agrate R3 — capacity-share, not full ownership), but the host fab is operated by Intel rather than ST. Because Intel’s 300mm fleet runs Intel’s own logic processes alongside the Tower capacity corridor, the firewall protocols and process-recipe segregation matter even more than at Agrate.

3.3 Intel’s intent to withdraw (early 2026)

In February 2026, Tower disclosed that Intel had communicated its intention to withdraw from the September 2023 agreement (Calcalistech, 2026-02-13 ◐; TrendForce, 2026-02-13 ◐). The reported alternative was shifting Tower’s planned New Mexico production to TPSCo Arai (300mm in Japan). ⚠ The withdrawal status as of late April 2026 needs ongoing verification — Tower’s interim 6-K filings are the cleanest source for legal status of the agreement.

The strategic implication for the photonics thesis is minor — the September 2023 agreement was for 65 nm BCD power management + RF SOI, not silicon photonics. PH18 has remained Newport-Beach-hosted throughout, and the 300mm SiPh process announced November 2024 is hosted at Migdal Haemek (Israel), not at Intel’s New Mexico fab. Intel’s withdrawal therefore does not affect Tower’s silicon-photonics roadmap, only its 300mm specialty-analog capacity-corridor planning.

4. Strategic context — why the 200mm North American footprint matters

For the AI-photonics scope, the Newport Beach + San Antonio combination matters in three ways:

4.1 Photonics manufacturing concentration risk

PH18 silicon photonics is hosted only at Newport Beach Fab 3. There is no PH18 redundancy at any other Tower fab. ⚠ This is a single-site concentration risk — a major Newport Beach disruption (earthquake, utility outage, regulatory action) would interrupt Tower’s entire silicon-photonics output. The November 2024 300mm SiPh process at Migdal Haemek partially mitigates this prospectively (different process, different site) but does not provide direct redundancy on the PH18 design library.

4.2 SiGe BiCMOS yield maturity

The Newport Beach line is the legacy Jazz SiGe BiCMOS line. Jazz’s 1990s-2000s SiGe BiCMOS heritage gives the line yield maturity that newer SiPh processes (e.g., the AMF 130 nm line, which GF acquired in November 2025) cannot match in absolute fab-age terms. The TS18SL / SBC18S5 driver / TIA flows that pair with PH18 inherit the Jazz BiCMOS yield curve.

4.3 US-foundry-capacity political signal

Both Newport Beach and San Antonio are US-soil 200mm fabs, which positions Tower well against US-foundry-policy themes (CHIPS Act, Pentagon trusted-foundry mandates, AI-export-control regimes). For US hyperscalers and US defense customers requiring on-shore 200mm specialty-analog capacity, Tower’s North American footprint is a structural advantage. ⚠ This is generally true of the broader Tower strategy and is referenced in Tower’s 20-F discussion of customer-mix diversification.

5. Open audit items

  1. ⚠ Realized vs originally targeted New Mexico ramp — the September 2023 agreement targeted full process qualification in 2024; Intel’s February 2026 withdrawal disclosure suggests the ramp slipped substantially. Tower 6-K filings are the cleanest authority for ramp-cadence reconstruction.
  2. ⚠ Status of Intel’s withdrawal as of late April 2026 — whether the agreement has been formally terminated, partially settled, or is being litigated is fluid and needs ongoing verification.
  3. ⚠ San Antonio Fab 9 utilization curve since the 2016 acquisition — Tower aggregates Texas with broader specialty-analog reporting at the segment level.
  4. ⚠ Status of the 15-year Maxim LTA (now ADI by virtue of the 2021 ADI-Maxim merger) — whether the LTA carries forward unchanged into the ADI relationship, or whether the contract has been renegotiated, is not publicly disclosed.
  5. ⚠ Maxim product-family enumeration at the 2016 Fab 9 closing — only category-level disclosure, no SKU-level visibility.
  6. ⚠ Newport Beach photonics segment WPM — Tower does not break out PH18 wafer-output volumes separately from the broader RF / SiGe BiCMOS / image-sensor / MEMS aggregate at Newport Beach.

Cross-references

Sources