Winbond says fast train is shaking up its chip-plant plan

Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦) wants to relocate its planned 12-inch wafer plant away from a science park in Tainan due to concerns that its wafer manufacturing would be affected by the vibration of passing high-speed trains, Hander Chang (張致遠), the company's spokesman, said last week.

"If the vibration causes a 2 percent decrease in the yield rate, then the revenue of a 12-inch wafer plant will be cut by NT$1.4 billion a year," Chang said.

Winbond, Taiwan's third-largest chipmaker, has earmarked some NT$120 billion in the construction of the company's first 12-inch wafer plant in the Tainan Science-based Industrial Park (台南科學園區) in cooperation with its partner, Toshiba Corp of Japan. Chang said the company is expected to produce 40,000 DRAM chips per month from this new wafer plant.

While construction of the new wafer plant was originally set to begin in the second half of the year, Winbond has decided to temporarily shelve the plan because the proposed site for its new wafer plant is just 200 to 400 meters away from the high-speed railway route that runs through the Tainan science park with a stop in Hsinshih (新市), Chang said, citing an evaluation report conducted by one of Winbond's foreign consultants.

The spokesman said the wafer plant is very sensitive to any unstable environment and Winbond is negotiating with the science park authorities for possible plant relocation to another site within the park. But he said that the move is in jeapordy because no other site is currently available. As a last resort, "Winbond is looking to relocate this plant to the neighboring Tainan Technology Industrial Park (台南科技工業區) or another industrial park located at Luchu (路竹) in Kaohsiung," Chang said.