US-based mobile chip designer Qualcomm Inc yesterday opened a manufacturing engineering and testing center in Hsinchu, expanding its presence in Taiwan.
Qualcomm also expects to accelerate its purchases in Taiwan, which already rose to NT$240 billion (US$7.9 billion) last year, up from NT$90 billion five years earlier, and should hit NT$300 billion next year.
The center is to provide services for the supply chain in the semiconductor industry, Roawen Chen (陳若文), senior vice president and chief supply chain and operations officer of Qualcomm, said at the facility’s inauguration ceremony.
Photo: Reuters
It is Qualcomm’s largest and most advanced engineering testing center outside of the company’s headquarters in the US, Chen said.
Qualcomm’s ties with Taiwan would further be strengthened when it becomes the first client of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) 4-nanometer fab in Phoenix, Arizona, he said.
The TSMC fab is under construction and expected to start production next year.
When Qualcomm first invested in Taiwan two decades ago, it had only two employees — a hardware engineer and a salesperson — as the company worked with HTC Corp (宏達電) to develop personal digital assistants, he said.
Qualcomm now has a combined workforce of 1,700 in Taipei and Hsinchu, and has invested NT$43 billion in Taiwan to grow with the local semiconductor ecosystem, Chen said.
Last year, it generated about NT$70 billion in production value for Taiwan’s information and communications technology industry, he said, citing a report by the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院).
Guests attending the inauguration ceremony included American Institute in Taiwan Director Sandra Oudkirk; Cliff Hou (侯永清), senior vice president of Europe and Asia sales and corporate research at TSMC, and ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) chief operating officer Tien Wu (吳田玉).
NEW IDENTITY: Known for its software, India has expanded into hardware, with its semiconductor industry growing from US$38bn in 2023 to US$45bn to US$50bn India on Saturday inaugurated its first semiconductor assembly and test facility, a milestone in the government’s push to reduce dependence on foreign chipmakers and stake a claim in a sector dominated by China. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened US firm Micron Technology Inc’s semiconductor assembly, test and packaging unit in his home state of Gujarat, hailing the “dawn of a new era” for India’s technology ambitions. “When young Indians look back in the future, they will see this decade as the turning point in our tech future,” Modi told the event, which was broadcast on his YouTube channel. The plant would convert
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Property transactions in the nation’s six special municipalities plunged last month, as a lengthy Lunar New Year holiday combined with ongoing credit tightening dampened housing market activity, data compiled by local land administration offices released on Monday showed. The six cities recorded a total of 10,480 property transfers last month, down 42.5 percent from January and marking the second-lowest monthly level on record, the data showed. “The sharp drop largely reflected seasonal factors and tighter credit conditions,” Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) deputy research manager Chen Chin-ping (陳金萍) said. The nine-day Lunar New Year holiday fell in February this year, reducing
New vehicle sales in Taiwan plunged about 37 percent sequentially last month as the long Lunar New Year holiday and 228 Peace Memorial Day holiday cut short the number of working days, along with the lingering uncertainty over import tax cuts on US vehicles, market researcher U-Car said in a report yesterday. New car sales last month totaled 22,043, slumping from 35,073 units in January and down 19.89 percent from 37,515 in February last year, U-Car data showed. Sales of imported luxury cars, led by Mercedes-Benz, plummeted about 45 percent to 3,109 units last month from 5,663 units in the previous month,
RSS