Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, said yesterday it expects its annual output to double over the next five years on the back of capacity expansion.
Chin Yung-pei (秦永沛), TSMC’s vice president for operations and product development, said the company’s annual production is expected to increase to 20 million 8-inch equivalent wafers by the end of 2015, up from the 10 million units it produced last year.
Through its intensified efforts to expand capacity, TSMC will have four new plants that will launch production on a small scale by the end of this year, Chin said.
To provide a wider range of services, TSMC has started development of IC packaging services and has assigned more than 250 of its employees to that particular field, he said at a technology forum in Hsinchu.
The market has been closely monitoring TSMC for comments on its outlook and operations.
Also at the forum, Jason Chen (陳俊聖), TSMC senior vice president for worldwide sales marketing, said production value of the global integrated circuit sector, excluding memory chips, is expected to rise 4 percent this year and 7 percent next year.
Chen said the compound annual growth rate between this year and 2015 is expected to reach 5 percent.
The development of mobile computing, cloud computing and artificial intelligence will serve as the engine of growth in the global IC industry in the future, he said.
Meanwhile, Chen said a new 12-inch wafer plant, known as Fab15 and located at the Central Taiwan Science Park (中部科學園區), is scheduled to start production in the fourth quarter of this year, three months ahead of schedule.
Fab15, TSMC’s third 12-inch plant, is designed to produce chips using mainly 28-nanometer technology. The installation of production equipment for the first phase of the new plant’s operations is expected to begin this month, Chen said.
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last