Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said its board had approved a plan to spend as much as US$126 million to acquire Taiwan OmniVision Investment Holding Co Ltd and a 49 percent stake in VisEra Holding Cayman Ltd, both local subsidiaries of OmniVision Technologies Inc
The world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement that the acquisitions are conditional on regulatory approval from related governments, including the US approving a Chinese consortium’s acquisition of OmniVision Technologies, which is based in Santa Clara, California.
TSMC supplies microprocessors for Apple Inc’s iPhone. The company’s proposed purchase of OmniVision Technologies’ local subsidiaries is to help clear a regulatory hurdle for a group of Chinese investors to acquire the firm, as Chinese firms are not permitted to operate semiconductor businesses in Taiwan.
OmniVision Technologies — which provided the rear camera sensor for Apple’s iPhone 4S — in April agreed to a US$1.9 billion acquisition by a Chinese conglomerate that includes Hua Capital Management Co (華資本管理公司), Citi Capital Holdings Ltd (中信資本) and GoldStone Investment Co (金石投資).
TSMC’s proposed deal would allow the Hsinchu-based chipmaker to increase its stake in VisEra Holding to 98.2 percent. VisEra Holding was established as a joint venture between TSMC and OmniVision Technologies.
TSMC’s board yesterday also gave the go-ahead for capital appropriations of roughly US$1.24 billion to expand capacity for advanced technology and packaging and assembly. The capital expenditures are also to cover certain logic capacity and specialty technology spending this quarter, as well as research and development costs.
TSMC plans to spend between US$10.5 billion and US$11 billion on capital expenditure this year, mostly on advanced technologies.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
RSS