Semiconductor manufacturer TSMC has announced plans to manufacture 28/22nm and 16/12nm chips in Europe. The chipmaker has entered a joint partnership with Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors. The entity formed – European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) GmbH will drive the development. The total investment in the ESMC project is more than €10 billion and up to 2,000 jobs will be created.
TSMC will have a majority stake in ESMC (70%), while the trio of Robert Bosch, Infineon Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors gets 10% each. ESMC will begin construction of a fab by H2, 2024. Mass production of the specified chips is scheduled to commence in 2027.
The company targets the production of 40,000 units of 300mm wafers per month using TSMC’s 28/22nm process and the 16/12nm FinFET process. The fab will not build smartphone chipsets or GPUs as the focus is on older nodes. The older nodes are needed for the production of microcontrollers needed in the automotive industry.
The other stakeholders in ESMC also bring automotive hardware expertise into the production mix. Bosch and Infineon are German-based companies while NXP is based in the Netherlands. Infineon produces memory for embedded systems used in modern cars. TSMC had previously built a 28nm fab for Sony image sensors used in cameras.
The evolution of ESMC is bound to bolster Europe’s automotive and industrial sectors. The target is outside the growing cutting-edge silicon field but key components are still relevant in modern cars and other technologies. It is also targeted at mitigating the impact of possible chip shortages in the automotive industry.
RELATED:
(source)
