Japan has asked some Taiwanese manufacturers to cooperate in alternative production of semiconductors, Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Hiroshi Kajiyama said yesterday, after a chip plant owned by Renesas Electronics Corp was hit by a fire this month.
“We are in communication with several manufacturing equipment makers [in Taiwan] to speed up procurement,” Kajiyama told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
“The ministry will also work together for a swift recovery by using all possible means,” he added.
Photo: Eugene Hoshiko, AP
A Renesas-owned Naka chip plant in northeast Japan was hit by fire earlier this month due to a power surge in one of the machines, putting more pressure on the broader chips industry amid a global shortage of semiconductors.
The company, which has about a 30 percent share of the global market for microcontroller unit chips used in vehicles, had initially said 11 machines were damaged in the fire, but yesterday said 23 machines need to be replaced.
Renesas chief executive officer Hidetoshi Shibata told a news conference that while production at the plant would resume within a month, recovery to pre-fire levels was expected to take 100 to 120 days from the incident.
He added that any short-term shipment of alternative chip production was impossible and the company would recuperate losses in the six months ending in December.
An extended outage could add to a global shortage of chips, which is disrupting some production of vehicles and electronic devices.
The Japanese government has called on equipment makers to help Renesas restore its production, with bureaucrats contacting companies at home and overseas to request they provide parts and machinery to the fire-hit company, a trade ministry official told reporters.
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) shares yesterday rallied 2 percent on the local stock market after Nvidia Corp said the contract chipmaker would be the sole supplier of its latest graphics processing chip, defusing speculation that Intel Corp would get a share of the orders. TSMC’s share price climbed to NT$562, snapping a three-day losing streak. It outperformed the benchmark index’s 1.18 percent gain. Net purchases by foreign institutional investors yesterday totaled 8.37 million shares, reversing net sales of 2.9 million shares on Thursday. The rebound follows Nvidia’s announcement that its latest artificial intelligence graphics processing unit (GPU), codenamed H100, would
Taiwan is expected to be the third-largest market for Singapore-based DBS Group Holdings Ltd, after DBS Bank Taiwan (星展台灣) completes its acquisition of Citibank Taiwan Ltd’s (台灣花旗) consumer banking business in August, a bank executive said yesterday. Taiwan would rank after only Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of profit contribution to DBS, followed by China, India and Indonesia, DBS Taiwan general manager Ng Sier Han (黃思翰) told a media briefing in Taipei. DBS Bank Taiwan expects to retain all 2.77 million Citibank Taiwan cardholders and help them to transition to DBS Taiwan cards over the next 12 months, Ng said. The bank
RSS