Carl Zeiss AG plans to increase investment and workforce in Taiwan this year to meet growing demand for advanced chip manufacturing and packaging inspections, the German company said yesterday.
It attributed robust demand for sophisticated packaging, such as 2.5D or 3D packaging, to an artificial intelligence boom and explosive demand for high-performance computing applications.
“We are accelerating our investment in Taiwan as it is a market with huge potential... We are looking mostly at the semiconductor area. Advanced packaging is the main direction we are working on in Taiwan,” Zeiss Taiwan general manager Henry Cai (蔡慧) told a news conference in Taipei. “We hope to increase the R&D workforce by at least 50 percent in Hsinchu.”
Photo courtesy of Zeiss Taiwan
The company offers nondestructive and high-resolution X-ray inspection to identify defects, which helps customers enhance production efficiency and improve yield rate of advanced packaging technology, such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology, Zeiss said.
It is also seeking potential merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities in the semiconductor area after last year acquiring local contact lens supplier Brighten Optix Corp (亨泰光學) for NT$5.4 billion (US$168.27 million). The deal would add about 200 employees to Zeiss Taiwan.
Zeiss in 2024 launched a NT$300 million innovation center at the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區), which is part of the company’s 10-year, NT$10 billion investment commitment through 2028. As of the end of 2024, it had invested NT$6 billion.
To enhance its localization strategy and deepen its cooperation with customers, Zeiss moved its advanced inspection equipment to the center, offering early inspection services for customers when their new chips are in the early stage of development.
The Middle East war is not expected to cause any raw material supply disruptions for the industry as most companies have learned lessons from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and adjusted, the company said.
However, spikes in transportation costs due to shipping route changes and higher crude oil prices have prompted the company to boost inventory of some spare parts against supply constraint risks, it said.
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