PowerChip plans Chinese fab for display, sensor ICs
Foundry Powerchip Technology Corp. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) has said it plans to invest alongside the Chinese authorities in Hefei City, Anhui province, in a joint venture to set up a 300mm wafer fab there, according to local reports.
The fab will operate as a foundry running 0.15-micron, 0.11-micron and 90nm manufacturing processes, for logic ICs, LCD driver chips, CIS image sensor chips, according to CTimes report.
The support will come in the form of an investment with Hefei Construction Investment and Holding Co. Ltd. to create the Hefei Jinghe wafer fab, the reports said. The total investment required is estimated at 13.5 billion Chinese yuan (about $2.2 billion) with the fab scheduled for completion in 2018 to 2019 and a manufacturing capacity of 40,000 wafer starts per month.
Hefei is a manufacturing center of BOE, a major Chinese LCD panel maker, and the building of a wafer fab there is being done to give the company a local source of supply.
Powerchip was one of a group of Taiwanese DRAM manufacturers that failed to remain competitive in DRAMS against the leading manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. In 2011 the company announced it would stop selling DRAMs under its own brand to focus on the production of LCD drivers, CMOS image sensors, flash memory and power management ICs
Investments by Taiwanese companies, often investments in kind in terms of IP and know how, are increasing as the Chinese government has rolled out a long-term initiative to foster domestic production of components.
In October 2014 United Microelectronics Corp. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) announced a plan to invest in joint venture along with Xiamen Municipal People’s Government and FuJian Electronics & Information Group focused on 300mm wafer foundry services. That joint venture, subsequently named as ChipLink Semiconductor Co. Ltd., is set to be based in Xiamen, and in October 2014 UMC said it was anticipating it would invest about $1.35 billion over the next five years.
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