TowerJazz Updates on its CIS Business

SeekingAlpha publishes a transcript of TowerJazz Q2 2016 earnings call. Few updates on image sensor business:

"Looking into our CMOS image sensor business, our largest application and market is the industrial market. As previously discussed, we have seen a pullback, which our customers attribute to the trade war. It is starting to pick up now with new projects, many of which are targeted towards large screen display inspection using very high resolution global shutter sensors. All of our new projects are based on our state-of-the-art global shutter pixels in our 65-nanometer, 12-inch line in Uozu. We expect these projects to ramp towards the end of next year. Orders for present products are forecast by customers to recover with wafer starts beginning during the fourth quarter of this year.

We have won a large face recognition sensor project for smartphones. It will be based on indirect time-of-flight technology and we'll use state-of-the-art stacking technology, utilizing our 300-millimeter, 65-nanometer platform. In parallel, for mobile applications, we are working with 3 leading fingerprint companies for under OLED and under LCD optical sensors, based upon our unique pixel technology. These projects are expected to begin to ramp in 2020, utilizing our well-established 0.18 micron, 200-millimeter CIS technology.

In the high-end photography area, we're moving along with the next-generation stacking sensor project, partnering with an undisputed leader in the market, targeted to ramp in 2021. Medical and dental x-ray demand has remained stable with strong margins. We see an increased demand for large CMOS-based panels. We're now in the final qualification stages of new products with one of the leading providers. Additionally, we are fully qualified and started to ship single-die wafer-scale medical x-ray sensors on 300-millimeter with 2 additional customers planning final product tapeout in the fourth quarter of this year.

...we have decided to accelerate our planned expansion and to allocate $100 million to increase the capacity of our 300-millimeter Uozu fab in Japan. Equipment should begin to arrive in this center, with most to all tools expected to be qualified during the first half of 2020. This investment not only increases our 300-millimeter wafer capacity but will drive additional benefits that tie to new and large 200-millimeter partnership activities. At image sensing, most of the capacity growth there is indeed at the end of 2020 and 2021, 2022."