Back in 2021, GlobalFoundries announced plans to spend around $4 billion to expand its manufacturing base in Singapore, and this week the new line was officially launched. The introduction of additional capacity will increase the productivity of the company’s Singapore plant by almost one and a half times to 1.5 million 300mm silicon wafers per year.
Image source: GlobalFoundries
As mentioned CNBCGlobalFoundries’ new 23,000 square meter facility can process an additional 450,000 300 mm silicon wafers per year. The company has owned businesses in Singapore since 2010, when it acquired its local assets in a deal with Chartered Semiconductor. Until recently, the company was able to produce 720,000 300mm silicon wafers per year and 692,000 200mm silicon wafers in Singapore.
Authorities say Singapore accounts for up to 11% of global semiconductor production, and Thomas Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, has called on other governments to follow Singapore’s lead and create an enabling environment for semiconductor production. The new cleanroom facility that GlobalFoundries is opening in Singapore will be the most technologically advanced in the country. It is important to add that the company has stalled in its development at the 12nm technical process and therefore cannot compete with the market leaders. However, this does not prevent it from remaining the third largest provider in the contract market in terms of sales.
The new workshop at GlobalFoundries will provide around 1,000 new jobs for highly skilled professionals, with the company employing almost 4,500 people in Singapore. GlobalFoundries also has offices in Germany and the United States. In the first case, the company’s management expressed dissatisfaction with the current priorities of the German authorities in distributing the subsidies, as they should go to Intel and TSMC, and with the needs of GlobalFoundries in this region are largely ignored.
Thomas Caulfield expressed confidence that the size of the semiconductor industry will double again in the next decade. The field of artificial intelligence and the automotive market will actively develop, as will the segment of industrial automation devices. There are still no prerequisites for renewed growth in the customer segment. In fact, even chip manufacturers’ inventories of finished products continue to grow, as the head of GlobalFoundries noted. It is true that there is a decline on the device manufacturer side. All this allows us to express the tentative hope of restoring the balance between supply and demand in the foreseeable future. The chip market as a whole continues to be threatened by high inflation, which is slowing consumer spending, particularly in China, Caulfield noted.
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