Belgium-based Imec, the world’s largest non-profit research institution focusing on nanotechnology, said yesterday it would invest NT$150 million (US$4.7 million) in Taiwan by setting up its first research site outside of Europe.
Imec Taiwan Innovation Center (ITIC) will hire more than 40 Taiwanese researchers over the next three years to conduct nanotechnology research that could be applied into information technology, green energy and biomedical fields, Imec CEO and president Luc Van den hove told reporters in Taipei.
The company picked Taiwan over China for the R&D center because “we have a long relationship with Taiwanese companies. Taiwan is a leading country in the technology domain.”
Imec was set up in 1984 in Leuven and employs about 1,800 workers of 60 nationalities across the globe. It was involved in the milestone development of 8-inch and 12-inch technology nodes of semiconductors.
It then transferred the technologies to a number of Taiwanese customers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (日月光) and MediaTek Inc (聯發科).
Imec set up a representative office in January 2008 in the Hsinchu Science Park to service Taiwanese customers, but the establishment of ITIC will help facilitate the exchange of researchers between Imec and these firms, Imec Taiwan general manager Wu Hsiang-wei (吳祥偉) said.
TSMC and Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技), for instance, have sent researchers to Imec for five or 10-year projects, he said.
Taiwanese firms could save on costs by utilizing local resources from ITIC, and small and medium-sized businesses that couldn’t afford such costs in the past could take advantage of this, Wu said.
Wu Ming-chi (吳明機), director of the Ministry of Economic Affairs industrial technology department, compared Imec to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (工研院).
“Basing Imec’s R&D center here will be a landmark for Taiwan. European firms have innovation, while Taiwan has the commercialization and production capabilities. Both are complementary,” Wu Ming-chi said.
The establishment of ITIC followed the announcement on Sept. 21, where 27 foreign firms — including Imec, Hewlett-Packard Co and Qualcomm Inc — signed letters of intent with the ministry to invest a total of NT$108.25 billion in Taiwan in the wake of the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with China in June.
These investments are expected to help generate 12,900 jobs in the electronics, chemical and electrical vehicle sector.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts