Recently, it was reported that UMC's new Singapore plant will be completed in mid-2024 and mass production is expected in early 2025. UMC said that in order to meet the demand for capacity construction, the board of directors approved a capital budget execution proposal of $39.8 million. The first phase of the new fab is planned to have a monthly production capacity of 30,000 wafers, which will provide 22 28nm processes with a total investment of US$5 billion.
Affected by factors such as the complex international situation, the global semiconductor ** chain is migrating, and the Southeast Asian region represented by Singapore is pinned on high hopes.
In the wafer manufacturing process, IDM companies such as Micron, Infineon, NXP, and STMicroelectronics, as well as wafer foundries such as GF, UMC, and VIS have invested in Singapore.
GF acquired Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in 2010 and took over its fab. In September 2023, GF announced the opening of its US$4 billion manufacturing facility in Singapore, further expanding its global production capacity. The expanded fab will produce an additional 450,000 300mm wafers per year, bringing GF's total capacity in Singapore to approximately 1.5 million 300mm wafers per year.
In February 2022, UMC announced that its board of directors approved plans to expand a new state-of-the-art fab at the Fab12i facility in Singapore, when UMC expected mass production of the new fab to begin by the end of 2024, with the latest news showing that the new fab is expected to be mass-produced in early 2025.
VIS has an 8-inch wafer fab in Singapore, and in October 2023**, VIS reported that VIS will go to Singapore to build its first 12-inch wafer fab, which is mainly to meet the demand for automotive chips, with an investment of at least US$2 billion, and will produce 28nm chips, which may be completed in 2026 at the earliest.
Although the demand for consumer electronics is sluggish and has not yet fully recovered, this does not affect the pace of expansion of wafer foundries.
Recently, the International Semiconductor Industry Association (SEMI) said that 11 and 42 wafer fabs will be put into operation in 2023 and 2024 respectively, covering production lines for 4-inch to 12-inch wafers.
Among them, Chinese mainland's production capacity will grow rapidly, ranking first in production capacity, and Taiwan, China will maintain second in production capacity, followed by South Korea, Japan, America, Europe, Southeast Asia and other regions.
Previously, the global semiconductor observation incomplete statistics, the scale of Chinese mainland wafer foundries reached 44, will increase to 32 in the future, and the process will focus on mature processes.
The industry believes that the promotion of applications such as AI and high-performance computing (HPC), as well as the gradual recovery of terminal demand, will promote the development of wafer foundry capacity and will help the expansion of the semiconductor industry.