European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (ESMC), a subsidiary of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), will hire almost 2,000, from Germany and other European countries, ESMC president Christian Koitzsch said on Monday.
At the Taiwan-Europe semiconductor cooperation forum in Berlin, Koitzsch said ESMC would utilize TSMC’s advanced technologies, talent in Europe and good work ethic in Germany to build a world-class talent pool for the semiconductor industry.
In August last year, TSMC announced it would team up with Robert Bosch GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG and NXP Semiconductors NV to set up ESMC, in which the Taiwanese partner would hold a 70 percent stake and the three foreign partners would own the remaining 30 percent.
Photo: CNA
The joint venture is scheduled to break ground on a 12-inch wafer fab in Dresden, the capital city of Saxony, in the second half of this year with mass production slated to start at the end of 2027, using TSMC’s 12 nanometer, 16nm, 22nm and 28nm processes for the production of automotive electronics and specialty industrial devices.
In addition to the large recruitment campaign, TSMC will dispatch hundreds of engineers to Dresden over the next three to five years to boost exchanges with ESMC, Koitzsch said.
Koitzsch, a physicist, switched jobs earlier this year to become the head of ESMC after holding different roles at Bosch and had headed the company’s Dresden Bosch plant since July 2021.
The ESMC president said his company will send its employees to Taiwan for training to better understand how the wafer fab will operate, which is expected to improve the new Dresden facility’s operational efficiency and eventually help to build a semiconductor ecosystem in Germany.
According to Koitzsch, ESMC’s clean room will have an area of about 45,000 square meters, while the facility’s economies of scale are expected to cut operating costs, strengthen competitiveness, and create tremendous job opportunities in the supply chain.
Koitzsch said ESMC’s new plant will apply to a wide range of green technologies so that the facility’s water consumption will be about 50 percent of the industry’s average and power consumption by every 1 square centimeter silicon chip will be about 60 percent of the industrial average.
Koitzsch added that the new fab is expected to roll out about 480,000 12-inch wafers a year to boost Germany’s share in the global market.
While EMSC is planning to build a large talent pool, Torsten Thieme, an advisor with Silicon Saxony, said unions in Germany always take a hardline stance to employers and that’s one of the challenges TSMC has to conquer.
With more than 500 members, Silicon Saxony is the largest high-tech network in Saxony, one of the largest information and communications technology clusters in Germany and microelectronics clusters in Europe, the organization said on its Web site.
In the wake of a labor shortage, TSMC needs to come up with competitive compensation to attract production line workers and engineers to work for ESMC, Thieme said.
Wolfgang Weber, CEO of ZVEI (the German Electro and Digital Industry Association), said as it is three years away from mass production of ESMC’s new facility in Dresden in 2027, TSMC still has time to work with the academy and government agencies to cultivate talent.
Weber said he knew Taiwanese people worked very hard and long hours but it is unlikely to request workers in Germany to work 50 hours a week.
DOLLAR CHALLENGE: BRICS countries’ growing share of global GDP threatens the US dollar’s dominance, which some member states seek to displace for world trade US president-elect Donald Trump on Saturday threatened 100 percent tariffs against a bloc of nine nations if they act to undermine the US dollar. His threat was directed at countries in the so-called BRICS alliance, which consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia have applied to become members and several other countries have expressed interest in joining. While the US dollar is by far the most-used currency in global business and has survived past challenges to its preeminence, members of the alliance and other developing nations say they are fed
LIMITED MEASURES: The proposed restrictions on Chinese chip exports are weaker than previously considered, following lobbying by major US firms, sources said US President Joe Biden’s administration is weighing additional curbs on sales of semiconductor equipment and artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips to China that would escalate the US crackdown on Beijing’s tech ambitions, but stop short of some stricter measures previously considered, said sources familiar with the matter. The restrictions could be unveiled as soon as next week, said the sources, who emphasized that the timing and contours of the rules have changed several times, and that nothing is final until they are published. The measures follow months of deliberations by US officials, negotiations with allies in Japan and the Netherlands, and
Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) yesterday said it expects any impact of new tariffs from US president-elect Donald Trump to hit the company less than its rivals, citing its global manufacturing footprint. Young Liu (劉揚偉), chairman of the contract manufacturer and key Apple Inc supplier, told reporters after a forum in Taipei that it saw the primary impact of any fresh tariffs falling on its clients because its business model is based on contract manufacturing. “Clients may decide to shift production locations, but looking at Foxconn’s global footprint, we are ahead. As a result, the impact on us is likely smaller compared to
TRUMP EFFECT: The chip component manufacturer has moved 80 percent of its resistor production to factories in Malaysia from China, ahead of likely harsh US tariffs Kaimei Electronic Corp (凱美), a supplier of passive components, yesterday said it has allocated a majority of its chip resistor manufacturing capacity to a Malaysian factory from China to brace for potential tariff hikes on Chinese goods from the US. The company’s remarks came amid investors’ growing concern about escalating trade frictions between China and the US, and how the US’ new trade policies would play out after US president-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Trump has threatened to levy 10 percent more on Chinese imports. “We have deployed a full production line this year in Malaysia to produce chip
RSS