Samsung Electronics, which has signed an image sensor foundry agreement with UMC, also plans to sell hundreds of fab equipment to UMC to support the latter’s construction of chip foundries.
According to the latest report, Samsung Electronics plans to sell 400 sets of fab equipment to UMC, which will be installed in UMC’s P6 factory. UMC’s P6 factory has not yet been put into production.
In the report, this plant of UMC plans to start mass production in 2023, and they hope that the P6 plant will have a monthly production capacity of 27,000 wafers.
Moreover, the UMC P6 factory, which plans to start mass production in 2023, will mainly use the 28nm process to produce chips for related customers, including image sensors and display driver chips.
At the beginning of this year, UMC announced that they planned to invest US$1.5 billion in factory construction this year, and the 400 sets of equipment that Samsung Electronics plans to sell to them are not expected to be among the US$1.5 billion previously planned.
Samsung Electronics itself is also an important chip foundry in the world. Its market share is larger than that of UMC, and its technology is also ahead of UMC. Their current process technology has reached 5nm, and the time for mass production is only slightly later than TSMC.
Furthermore, in the first quarter of this year, Samsung Electronics’ share of the global chip foundry market was 15.9%. Although it is less than TSMC’s 54.1%, it is higher than UMC’s 7.4%.
Samsung Electronics has handed over some of its image sensors to the foundry of UMC because the market has a strong demand for Samsung Electronics’ image sensors, but their own production capacity cannot meet the strong demand.
|VIA|
