Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (
The center will focus on nanotechnology and precision-optical machinery.
"We hope the establishment of the new R&D center will expedite our R&D process and, therefore, enhance our competitiveness," Hon Hai's founder and chairman Terry Gou (
Hon Hai, which might replace Singapore's Flextronics International Ltd to become the world's largest EMS provider, plans to expand its R&D manpower to a maximum of 3,000 people and pour NT$12 billion into the center for the next three years.
The company has lodged up to 17,000 applications for patents and has patented around 12,000 inventions so far, Gou said.
The center is expected to facilitate the company's transformation into "high-tech Hon Hai" from merely "manufacturer Hon Hai" by attracting overseas researchers and cooperating with foreign R&D centers, Gou said.
The project has three stages. Hon Hai plans to complete the first-stage of construction by next July and recruit 1,000 R&D specialists at the same time.
The company posted consolidated revenue of NT$327.79 billion last year, up from NT$245.09 billion in 2002. It has generated sales of NT$166.05 billion for the first half of this year, around 37.74 percent of the forecasted NT$440 billion worth of revenue for this year.
"The company often sets aside 10 percent to 15 percent of its annual revenue for the R&D work," said Chen Ga-lane (
Strong R&D capability would back up the company's plan to expand its layouts of computer, communication, consumer electronics (3Cs) into 6Cs domains (3Cs plus cars, channels and [digital] contents), he said.
According to Chen, R&D work in the new center will begin in two years on nanotech stampers, nanotech optics and nanotech heat conductivity, in collaboration with the National Nano Devices Laboratories under the National Science Commission and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
These technologies could be applied in the manufacture of component parts such as nanotech batteries for notebooks or hand-sets, which have double the energy capacity of current batteries, and printer-reader heads for better printing quality, he said.
Hon Hai has set up several R&D centers, including one in Tokyo for precision machinery, Beijing for academic nanotech research, San Jose, California, for e-papers and Finland for wireless technology.
The company's Beijing center is focusing on developing nanotechnology for electronic circuits and devices from single atoms and molecules, but will turn its focus toward miniature batteries and heat-dissipation products within three years, according to a report in a Chinese-language newspaper yesterday.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS