Semiconductor equipment manufacturer Skytech Inc (天虹科技) on Wednesday said that it expects customer demand to be high through the second quarter of next year, particularly for equipment used in advanced chip manufacturing and packaging technologies driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
The company’s new physical vapor deposition devices used in panel-level packaging (PLP) have been rapidly gaining traction, with three machines to be delivered to server customers and one to a US customer in the first quarter next year, Skytech chief executive officer George Yi (易錦良) said in Hsinchu City.
“Customer validation has been exceptionally strong. We are preparing for the shipment of the fifth machine in just eight months since we began developing the equipment last year upon the establishment of new industry standards,” Yi said.
Photo: Lin Yi-ju, Taipei Times
“It usually takes one to two years to develop new semiconductor equipment,” he added.
Last year, the 310mm by 310mm panel size emerged as an industry standard for PLP technology after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) replaced circular 300mm wafers with them.
PLP technology is widely expected to be a successor to chip-on-wafer-on-substrate technology, which is used to package Nvidia Corp’s AI chips.
Skytech expects advanced packaging equipment to make up about 40 percent of the company’s total revenue this year, Yi said.
The company also expects indium phosphide-based and silicon-carbide-based wafer manufacturing equipment to become another growth driver, thanks to rapidly growing demand for optical transceiver modules used in AI servers, he said.
This year as a whole, Skytech’s revenue is expected to outgrow last year’s NT$2.24 billion (US$69.63 million), Yi said, after revenue in the first seven months soared 37 percent year-on-year to NT$1.5 billion.
“We have order visibility through the second quarter of next year,” he said.
In the first half of the year, Skytech’s net profit was NT$171 million, up 151.06 percent from NT$68.11 million a year earlier. Earnings per share jumped to NT$2.54 from NT$1.01, while gross margin advanced to 41.71 percent from 40.45 percent.
Revenue expanded 34 percent to NT$1.3 billion from NT$974 million over the same period, company data showed.
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