TSMC Acquires PSC Land for New Fab Construction

Taipei, Jan. 13, 2011 (CENS)--Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) yesterday announced its acquisition of a mothballed construction site from PowerChip Semiconductor Corp. (PSC) for NT$2.9 billion (US$96 million at US$1:NT$30) as the location for its another prominent 300mm fab project.

TSMC will build two advanced 300mm wafer fabs on this site, which sits in the Hsinchu Science Park, as part of its “GigaFab” project, which highlights the fabs that each can put out 250,000 wafers of chips a month.

TSMC will develop sub-20nm process technologies in the planned factories to meet next wave of demands. Currently, the chipmaker's advanced process capacities are completely inundated by swarming foundry contracts, pressing it to seek additional capacities.

Suppliers of chip-making equipment reported that the land would be convenient for TSMC to quickly deploy production capacity to deal with excessive demands for 28nm and 40nm process foundry services in 2011 as beam structures for factory building have been completed on one of the lands. The land with completed beam structures was originally designed by PSC to turn out 60,000 wafers of chips a month.

PSC originally planned to build one 300mm fab each on the two sites. However, market collapse discouraged the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chipmaker from continuing the projects after it completed beam structure of a factory building on one of the land lots.

As part of its expansion plan, TSMC has started construction of its Fab 15 factory in the Central Taiwan Science Park, and is boosting capacity at its Fab 12 factory and Fab 14 in the Southern Taiwan Science Park.