Japan is seeking to “drive growth” in the nation’s chip industry, trying to breathe new life into a sector with massive capacity, but trouble turning out cutting-edge products, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a report yesterday.
The ministry would treat semiconductor industry growth as a “national project” — as important as securing food and energy, it said.
The Japanese government will support the establishment of manufacturing bases, including through joint ventures with overseas chip foundries, the ministry said.
The push comes amid a global chip shortage that has weighed on manufacturing across a range of industries and threatens productions at Japanese automakers.
Japan’s share of global semiconductor sales dwindled to just 10 percent in 2019, down from 50 percent in 1988.
The country still has 84 chip factories, the most in the world, but they are not producing enough high-end products. As a result, Japan now has to import 64 percent of its semiconductors.
The report follows a draft growth strategy from the Japanese Cabinet secretariat issued earlier this week, which assessed that the country’s semiconductor manufacturing base is outdated.
Japan was the world’s biggest maker of microchips in the 1980s, but has since lost out to the likes of Taiwan and South Korea.
The ministry said that it will seek a “drastic revamp” of existing chip factories deemed strategically important in supporting the global supply chain.
It will also strengthen development of chips required for post-5G systems and supporting green innovation, it said.
The government will identify areas especially important to the nation and consider “special treatment” beyond policies taken for regular industries, the report said.
STOCK, CASH: Quarterly profit-sharing bonuses would supplement payments under the Incentive Pay Plan, offering ‘transparency’ and ‘predictability,’ an executive said Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光) yesterday unveiled a new profit-sharing program and structural wage hikes as part of its efforts to build a predictable and transparent compensation framework in response to feedback from unions. The memorychip maker, a subsidiary of US-based Micron Technology Inc, announced the major compensation structural overhaul during an online news conference following a milestone agreement with the union representing more than 10,000 workers at its Taichung facility. Under the new framework, quarterly profit-sharing bonuses would supplement payments under the Incentive Pay Plan (IPP), the company said. The IPP formula has also been substantially enhanced, it said. “Profit-sharing mechanisms are common
Micron Memory Taiwan and a union representing workers at its Taichung operations today said they had signed a labor-management agreement covering multiple issues, prompting both sides to withdraw from mediation scheduled for tomorrow. The joint statement did not disclose the terms of the agreement, saying the company and the union would separately communicate details to affected employees in the coming days. Idaho-based Micron, the world's third-largest memory chipmaker, employs about 15,000 people in Taiwan, a key manufacturing base where it produces DRAM and high-bandwidth memory chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers. Any disruption to Micron's Taiwan operations could affect already strained global
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is suspending some construction work after an accident at one of its building sites in southern Taiwan led to the deaths of four workers. The incident took place on Tuesday during steel structure construction at TSMC’s Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, the company said. Workers fell from a height while performing steel structure hoisting and installation, a report from the Central News Agency said. A cause might be aged bolts, it said, citing a preliminary assessment by the Southern Taiwan Science Park Bureau. The bureau said that work would only resume after Shang Hao Machinery Co (上昊機械),
China proposed adding advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to its export-control list, potentially restricting overseas transfers of AI models and chip designs in an effort to keep closer control over homegrown advancements in a strategically important sector. The draft proposal covers 23 AI technologies, including large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters. Restricted technologies would include model weights and source code for products exceeding certain performance thresholds. Chinese AI startups have this summer made significant progress in closing the gap on US industry leaders. Models such as Moonshot (月之暗面) AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest editions offer better pricing,
RSS