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.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
RSS