Panasonic announced plans today for the expansion of its semiconductor production facility at its Tonami plant in Japan. The company plans to invest 94 billion yen for this expansion.

The new plant will focus on producing image sensors for various digital appliances. Production work will start in September 2008 and will be launched in August 2009.

This expansion will strengthen Panasonic's image sensor business in areas of digital cameras, in-vehicle devices, camcorders, broadcasting and medical equipment. Slowly, the company also aims at increasing the production capacity to nearly 30,000 wafers per month.

Panasonic has been positioning as the most committed company focused in developing high-quality semiconductor components and core solutions for digital networking focusing on five digital consumer electronics areas including optical disc devices, digital TV sets, mobile communications, image sensing and automotive electronics.

The company's semiconductor business is backed by the combined system technology capabilities of the Panasonic Group and its low-power consumption, high-speed signal processing and fine patterning technologies, which are critical requirements for consumer electronics.

The new plant is believed to cope with the progress of fine processing technology and to respond to the rapid expansion of the digital camera and other image-related markets. It will match up with the demand for more sophisticated features including higher resolutions.

The semiconductor production facility will employ environmental measures including local cleaning technology to reduce CO2 emissions from the air conditioning systems in clean rooms by 30 percent compared with the existing plant.