Sat, Jul 13, 2024 page12

• ASE launches new testing facility in San Jose on AI demand

  • By Lisa Wang / Staff reporter
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  ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控) yesterday launched its second testing facility in San Jose, California, to expand advanced chip testing capacity such as burn-in testing to satisfy customers’ rising engineering needs for emerging semiconductor applications, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC).

  ISE Labs Inc, a fully owned subsidiary of ASE, would operate the advanced testing facility.

  When added to its first facility in nearby Fremont, ISE would double its available research-and-development lab and business space to 150,000m2 in hopes of boosting the US semiconductor supply chain, the company said in a statement.

  

  An undated photograph shows executives of ISE Labs Inc, a fully owned subsidiary of the world’s biggest chip packager, ASE Technology Holding Co, meeting at the company’s new facility in San Jose, California.

  Photo courtesy of ASE Technology Holding Co

  “As the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain reshoring continues to escalate, demand for our proven engineering expertise is growing in parallel,” ISE Labs chief executive officer Kenneth Hsiang (項世傑) said in the statement.

  “Expanding our operations by adding a second facility is vital to support our growing customers, who are onsite daily due to the collaborative nature of our work,” Hsiang said. “Ease of access in the South [San Francisco] Bay was a key consideration in selecting our new site.”

  Numerous customers are working on solutions for AI, machine learning, advanced driver assistance systems and HPC, the statement said.

  ISE Labs has spent about US$500 million in the company's US labs and hired more than 200 local employees, company president Jui Ko said. The company expected to invest about US$200 million in the San Jose facility over time in accordance with customers' demand, Ko said.

  The San Jose facility would primarily house qualification and reliability processes, including environmental, mechanical, electrostatic discharge, failure analysis, and chip burn-in testing, the statement said.

  ISE Labs’ high-power burn-in solutions — vital to detecting early failures in a semiconductor device — are among the best and highest-performing in the industry, it said.

  The Fremont site would expand its already robust set of test functions, including automated test equipment program development, test hardware design, device characterization, wafer probing, engineering, pre-production and final testing, and system-level testing, it said.

  ASE in April increased its capital spending for the second time, boosting its budget by 10 percent from an earlier estimate of US$2.1 billion to cope with growing demand.

  As part of the budget adjustments, the Kaohsiung-based company also planned to allocate a bigger slice of the budget, about 24 percent, for chip testing business from an original estimate of 18 percent to get more non-turnkey solutions business.

  ASE is also scouting potential sites to deploy advanced chip packaging capacity in the US, Japan and Mexico, in response to rising demand for improved supply chain resilience amid mounting geopolitical risks, the company said last month.
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