Dubbed a “health examiner for IC,” Materials Analysis Technology Inc (MA-tek, 閎康科技) is setting up new laboratories in Kumamoto, Japan, and the US state of Arizona to support its “big clients,” and is eyeing more locations in the future amid the changing IC supply chain landscape.
In an interview with CNA on Saturday, Materials Analysis Technology CEO and chairperson Hsieh Yong-fen (謝詠芬) said the company has benefited from the US-China trade war.
Hsieh said the semiconductor industry has prospered around the world to an extent that would have been hard to imagine five years ago. It has become a national defense industry with governments pushing for their own onshore integrated circuit (IC) production.
Photo: CNA
MA-tek provides analytical services to a wide range of industries, including the semiconductor industry, materials and equipment suppliers, the solar cell industry and optical communications. Clients in the IC industry account for 50 percent of customers, the company’s Web site showed
As many countries are welcoming investment and construction of semiconductor fabs, the prospect for the development of related industries is promising, Hsieh said. MA-tek, which already has 16 laboratories in Taiwan, Japan and China, plans to establish more in the US and Europe, she said.
“MA-tek has been a beneficiary of the US-China trade war,” Hsieh said.
The opening of MA-tek’s lab in Kumamoto last month “was not in [MA-tek’s] original plan,” Hsieh said, though the company did set up a lab in Nagoya, Japan, in 2019 at the invitation of Toyota Motor Corp to work with the latter’s network companies.
The chairwoman said that the Kumamoto lab is for MA-tek’s biggest client, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry company, which chose the location as its manufacturing base in Japan.
The Kumamoto lab is expected to begin contributing to the company’s revenue in the fourth quarter, Hsieh said, adding that there are plans to build at least two more labs in the city.
As Japan also plans to build semiconductor factories in Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese prefecture is another possible location for future MA-tek investment, she said.
MA-tek has also already rented premises in Phoenix to be able to provide service to the TSMC fab in Arizona, she said.
Hsieh said that many major TSMC customers in San Jose, California, have also invited MA-tek to build advanced failure analysis labs, and Europe is a “definite destination,” but not in the near future.
In China, MA-tek currently has labs in Shanghai, Xiamen and Shenzhen. While China’s development of advanced semiconductor production processes has currently been blocked, there are still abundant opportunities in automotive electronics, she said, so the company is looking to have labs in other Chinese cities.
Regardless of in which country the company establishes a lab, “MA-tek’s aim is to follow clients and garner the greatest benefits by knowing the clients’ industrial operations well and offering corresponding analysis services,” Hsieh said.
For example, the services provided to a foundry mainly focus on material analysis and surface analysis for the foundry’s advanced semiconductor production processes, and research and development of materials.
On the other hand, when working with IC design companies, failure analysis and reliability analysis are the services most often provided by MA-tek, she said.
Reliability analysis is also most needed in places where there are large end-product markets, such as China, where MA-tek has two such labs in Shanghai, she added.
In terms of the IC industry, Hsieh said as the production process advances, IC structures are becoming more complex, as are measuring techniques.
In the early days, semiconductors were planar, but now both fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) and gate-all-around (GAA) — the two latest state-of-the-art transistor architectures developed to further the performance of ICs — are three-dimensional structures, with GAA being one hundred times more complex than FinFET, she said.
The advancement has made analysis much more challenging, she said, adding that MA-tek has had to introduce artificial intelligence in its programs for measuring and made major investments in outside developers to speed up programming development.
Regarding the company’s prospects, Hsieh said there is still much room for development around the world, as there are potential clients in many industries, including biomedicine, metals and textiles.
For example, in Japan, where cosmetics and beer are objects of MA-tek’s analysis work, “A can of beer does not cost much, but testing costs tens of thousands of yen,” Hsieh said of the beer analysis, in which a Japanese client wanted to analyze the structure of beer foam to understand how it affects the taste.
Impressed by Japanese companies’ approach to research and development, the researcher-turned-CEO lamented that in Taiwan only the top companies are willing to spend on research and development, probably out of pressure to lead and outperform competitors.
Hsieh said she hopes to expand the company’s network as much as possible in overseas markets to avoid cost competition blindly waged by competitors, reaching every science park around the globe in the same ways as McDonald’s Corp and Starbucks Corp.
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