King Yuan Electronics Co (京元電子) yesterday said it would shut down its factories for 48 hours to be thoroughly disinfected amid concern over COVID-19 infections linked to its manufacturing campus in Miaoli County.
As of yesterday, 67 King Yuan employees, mostly migrant workers from the Philippines, had tested positive for the disease after a large-scale rapid screening program was launched for the company’s 7,300 workers.
King Yuan, a chip testing and packaging service provider, had resisted halting production for fear of disrupting supply, kindling anger among employees and nearby residents.
Photo provided by King Yuan Electronics Co via CNA
King Yuan, headquartered in Hsinchu City, counts handset chip supplier MediaTek Inc (聯發科), display driver IC maker Novatek Microelectronics Corp (聯詠) and international corporations among its customers.
The production disruption would reduce output and revenue alike by between 4 and 6 percent this month, as its six plants in Hsinchu, and Miaoli’s Tongluo (銅鑼) and (竹南) Jhunan townships would shut down.
King Yuan posted NT$2.86 billion (US$103.17 million) in revenue last month, expanding 10.72 percent from NT$2.58 billion in May last year. That brought the company’s revenue in the first five months of this year to NT$12.17 billion, up 8.87 percent year-on-year.
The shutdown would not affect its financial performance for the full year this year, the company said.
King Yuan was the world’s No. 8 chip testing and packaging service provider last quarter, with revenue of NT$267 million, a tally market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) showed.
That gave King Yuan a market share of 3.7 percent.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
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
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS