Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is to decide this week whether to invest in Arm Holdings Ltd, which plays a vital role in the semiconductor ecosystem, the company said yesterday.
Arm’s customers, including Apple Inc, Nvidia Corp, Alphabet Inc and Advanced Micro Devices Inc have agreed to back the UK-based chip designer’s US$55 billion initial public offering (IPO) in the US. Intel Corp has also agreed to be a cornerstone investor in the offering.
“We’re going to make a decision this week about Arm,” TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) told reporters on the sidelines of the Semicon Taiwan trade show in Taipei. “Arm is an important element of our ecosystem, our technology and our customers’ ecosystem.”
Photo: CNA
“We want it to be successful. We want it to be healthy,” Liu said, without disclosing the firm’s potential investment amount.
Asked about TSMC’s planned fab in Germany, Liu said the chipmaker has formed a consortium with three partners to build a 12-inch factory in Dresden, which would focus on automotive chips.
It is in the process of applying for government subsidies, Liu said.
“We are in the process of getting through the German government and the EU support. I think it will soon come up,” Liu said.
The consortium, European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (ESMC) GmbH, is to be 70 percent owned by TSMC, while customers Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG and NXP Semiconductors NV would each hold 10 percent.
Liu said he was not concerned about a labor shortage in Germany, or other sites around the world.
In the US, the local government and community have shown their support and are assisting TSMC in resolving issues associated with the factory construction in Arizona, he said.
“Arizona is the first test in our overseas development,” Liu said, adding: “It is a learning process.”
Having visited the Arizona site last month, Liu said: “In the past five months the improvement has been tremendous. I’m sure it will be a very successful project.”
Asked about the tight supply of its chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, or CoWoS, packaging technology, Liu said the company had spent 15 years developing the advanced chip packaging technology and is unable to fully meet customers’ orders because demand suddenly jumped threefold.
The company currently fills about 80 percent of orders, but should be able to catch up with the demand within one-and-a-half years, he said.
Asked about new technologies, Liu said the chipmaker is developing its own silicon photonics technology, the next-generation chip packaging technology dubbed compact universal photonic engine (COUPE), to cope with robust demand for artificial-intelligence (AI) applications such as servers.
COUPE would be a crucial chip technology, Liu said, adding that he expects the silicon photonics market to expand at an annual compound growth rate of 25.7 percent to US$78.6 billion in 2030 from US$12.6 billion last year.
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