A senior navy officer yesterday questioned a local ship builder’s capability to build submarines, saying the company’s briefing material shows it is not ready to take on such a project.
Vice Admiral Huang Shu-kuang (黃曙光), chief of staff of Navy Command Headquarters, was echoing Minister of National Defense Kao Hua-chu’s (高華柱) comment that he was not sure if local shipbuilders have the technology to build submarines for the navy.
The idea was put forth as early as 2002, but more assessments will be required because the building of submarines involves many technologies, Kao said.
In reply to lawmakers’ questions, Kao said the most basic requirement for locally built submarines is that they be able to dive and surface, and the most important thing is to ensure the safety of the navy personnel.
According to a report in the Chinese-language United Evening News, Kao described a proposal by state-run CSBC Corp, Taiwan (CSBC, 台灣國際造船) to build military submarines as “bold and muddleheaded.”
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方), an expert on defense affairs, said being bold is better than being timid. CSBC should be given a chance to “start by building small submarines,” from which it will acquire the experience to produce bigger ones, Lin said.
Huang said that after reviewing data supplied by CSBC, he felt “the company’s capabilities were still insufficient.”
Kao said the Ministry of National Defense was “carefully reviewing” the CSBC proposal, which he said was “just an idea.”
The ministry has not begun to evaluate its feasibility, he said.
CSBC vice president Chen Feng-lin (陳豊霖) was angered by Kao’s description of his company’s proposal as “bold and muddleheaded,” according to the newspaper report.
“Is Kao a navy man? I don’t think so,” Chen was quoted as saying, referring to Kao’s previous service in the infantry.
While he respects the minister’s position, Chen said it must be pointed out that a group of German submarine experts expressed optimism eight years ago that CSBC would be able to build a complete submarine, including its weapons system, if the company could acquire some advanced technology in collaboration with foreign companies.
“All we need is a little support and a small investment [from the government],” Chen was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
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
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
RSS