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.
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.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
‘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
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
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
RSS