AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the world’s No. 4 LCD maker, plans to recruit 3,000 engineers this year to expand its display and solar technology work force, the company said on Thursday.
The new recruits will be responsible for research, manufacturing, marketing and sales of AUO display and solar products, supporting the company’s work on low-carbon display technology like organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, and electronic paper, it said in an e-mail.
“Part of the work force will be assigned to run our company’s new operating bases or joint ventures overseas, particularly in China, eastern Europe and Brazil,” AUO marketing manager Freda Lee (李秀芬) said by telephone.
AUO set up two manufacturing facilities with more than 1,000 employees each in the Czech Republic and Slovakia last year. It also formed joint ventures with Hong Kong’s TPV Technology Ltd (冠捷科技), the world’s largest contract monitor maker, to assemble LCD TV modules in Poland and Brazil, Lee said.
In January, AUO announced another recruitment drive for the Aurora Project, a collaboration with international academic institutes and corporations to bring more than 200 staff from other countries to conduct research on green power technologies.
Those researchers will work in AUO’s second research center in Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區). The center will eventually house 2,000 engineers and focus primarily on foundational research for medium and long-term technologies in green power and displays.
Last year, AUO hired 2,500 engineers for its operations.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
RSS