The decision made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to build its 3nm wafer fab in the Southern Taiwan Science Park has won acclaims from both member firms of the TSMC Grand Alliance and Taiwan's IC packaging and testing firms, as the clustering effect triggered by the leading foundry house will continue generating huge business opportunities for equipment and materials suppliers and even outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) firms.
The ensuing geographic proximity will be conducive to the development of back-end companies. For instance, as a member of the Grand Alliance, Chunghwa Precision Test Tech (CHPT) said that the company will invest more in talent cultivation and R&D to supply more advanced wafer probe cards. The firm's general manager SK Huang said that after entering the 7/5/3 nm nodes, wafer fabrication requires higher costs and therefore more precision wafer probing will be badly needed. CHPT has now maintained offices in Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Kaohsiung to provide quick services to customers.
IC packaging and testing industry insiders said that TSMC is likely to continue using its in-house InFO (integrated fan-out) or CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) advanced technologies to package application processor chips for Apple's iPhones or AI (artificial intelligence) chips for supercomputers. But as leading global tech players are expected to relase more orders for GPUs, FPGAs and edge computing chips, IC packaging and testing firms clustering around TSMC are poised to benefit from the foundry house's move to set up its 5nm and 3nm process fabs in southern Taiwan.
Industry watchers said that TSMC's 3nm process is slated for volume production in 2022 to go in line with the take-off of the AI era, when AI chips will be massively applied to supercomputers, enterprise cloud services, servers, and edge computing, while the application processors of smartphones will also boast more AI functions, not to mention rampant IoT (Internet of Things) applications. In the upcoming AI and IoT era, they added, TSMC will continue to lead Taiwan's semiconductor industry to compete against Samsung Electronics and Intel.