Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is in early talks with the German government about potentially establishing a plant in the country, a senior executive said on Saturday.
Various factors, including government subsidies, customer demand and the talent pool, would influence its final decision, TSMC senior vice president of Europe and Asia sales Lora Ho (何麗梅) told reporters on the sidelines of a technology forum in Taipei.
The discussions come as the EU and others seek to increase domestic chip production to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruptions.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
The chipmaker has not discussed incentives with Berlin or decided on a location, Ho said.
TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) in June told shareholders that the Hsinchu-based company had begun assessments on setting up manufacturing operations in the European country.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker, which mostly produces domestically, has started to diversify over the past year to help meet demand in various major countries seeking to bolster domestic semiconductor production out of national security and self-sufficiency concerns.
It is building a US$12 billion facility in Arizona, and is set to soon start construction of a US$7 billion plant in Japan.
Meanwhile, the EU said it would unveil the “European Chips Act” in the first half of next year as part of its strategy to boost semiconductor production.
One of the goals would be to account for 20 percent of global production by 2030, the bloc said.
Separately, research teams at Intel Corp on Saturday unveiled work that the US company believes would help it keep speeding up and shrinking computing chips over the next 10 years, with several technologies aimed at stacking parts of chips on top of each other.
Intel’s Research Components Group introduced the work in papers at an international conference held in San Francisco.
The company is working to regain a lead in making the smallest, fastest chips that it has lost in the past few years to rivals like TSMC and Samsung Electronics Co.
The newly unveiled research gives a look into how Intel plans to compete beyond 2025.
One of the ways Intel is packing more computing power into chips by stacking up “tiles” or “chiplets” in three dimensions rather than making horizontally designed chips, it said.
Intel showed work that could allow for 10 times as many connections between stacked tiles, meaning that more complex tiles can be stacked on top of one another.
However, perhaps the biggest advance showed at the event was a research paper demonstrating a way to stack transistors — tiny switches that form the most basic building blocks of chips by representing the ones and zeros of digital logic — on top of one another.
Intel believes the technology would yield a 30 to 50 percent increase in the number of transistors it can pack into a given area on a chip.
Raising the number of transistors is the main reason chips have consistently gotten faster over the past 50 years.
“By stacking the devices directly on top of each other, we’re clearly saving area,” Intel Components Research Group director Paul Fischer said. “We’re reducing interconnect lengths and really saving energy, making this not only more cost efficient, but also better performing.”
PATENTS: MediaTek Inc said it would not comment on ongoing legal cases, but does not expect the legal action by Huawei to affect its business operations Smartphone integrated chips designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) on Friday said that a lawsuit filed by Chinese smartphone brand Huawei Technologies Co (華為) over alleged patent infringements would have little impact on its operations. In an announcement posted on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, MediaTek said that it would not comment on an ongoing legal case. However, the company said that Huawei’s legal action would have little impact on its operations. MediaTek’s statement came after China-based PRIP Research said on Thursday that Huawei filed a lawsuit with a Chinese district court claiming that MediaTek infringed on its patents. The infringement mentioned in the lawsuit likely involved
Taipei is today suspending work, classes and its US$2.4 trillion stock market as Typhoon Gaemi approaches Taiwan with strong winds and heavy rain. The nation is not conducting securities, currency or fixed income trading, statements from its stock and currency exchanges said. Authorities had yesterday issued a warning that the storm could affect people on land and canceled some ship crossings and domestic flights. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) expects its local chipmaking fabs to maintain normal production, the company said in an e-mailed statement. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp said it has activated routine typhoon alert
GROWTH: TSMC increased its projected revenue growth for this year to more than 25 percent, citing stronger-than-expected demand for AI devices and smartphones The Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) yesterday raised its forecast for Taiwan’s GDP growth this year from 3.29 percent to 3.85 percent, as exports and private investment recovered faster than it predicted three months ago. The Taipei-based think tank also expects that Taiwan would see a 8.19 percent increase in exports this year, better than the 7.55 percent it projected in April, as US technology giants spent more money on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and development. “There will be more AI servers going forward, but it remains to be seen if the momentum would extend to personal computers, smartphones and
Catastrophic computer outages caused by a software update from one company have once again exposed the dangers of global technological dependence on a handful of players, experts said on Friday. A flawed update sent out by the little-known security firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc brought airlines, TV stations and myriad other aspects of daily life to a standstill. The outages affected companies or individuals that use CrowdStrike on the Microsoft Inc’s Windows platform. When they applied the update, the incompatible software crashed computers into a frozen state known as the “blue screen of death.” “Today CrowdStrike has become a household name, but not in