Maria Marced, European president of the Taiwanese foundry, told delegates in keynote at Future Horizon's International Electronics Forum taking place here the company would announce "striking figures at its next update for turnover and planned investments."

Earlier this year, the company said it would invest $2.5 billion in the coming year, itself an increase on earlier intentions of spending $1.5 billion.

Marced said there are very positive signals that "this major recession in the global industry and the semiconductor sector is coming to an end, after demand in the fourth quarter of last year fell like a rocket."

The keys to a recovery will be more innovation to create demand, and a crucially important task for improving profitability of the ICs sector will mean increasing collaboration by all involved in the food chain, she added.

"Demand will certainly return. All previous recessions have been followed by strong recovery. We must, though, recognize this industry has a problem, profitability and operating margins in the past few years has been dreadful," Marced said.

She also cautioned that increased demand will to an increasing extent come from emerging markets "that will require lower price points, and we will need to reduce costs accordingly."

That, she stressed, can only come through collaborating on future process nodes, which will lead to the necessary improvements on return-on-investment and speed time-to-market.

Asked about the proposed merger between GlobalFoundries and Chartered Semiconductor, Marced merely said "we welcome competition" but added that "with the significant capacity we are installing, any competitor will need to make the enormous investment in fab capacity we are undertaking."

TSMC plans to increase manpower as well over the coming year in R&D, increasing process research and development staff by 30 percent from the current 1200, and a 15 percent increase in the 600 engineering staff involved in design methodologies.

Most of these will be in Taiwan, but there will also be major push in Europe, following TSMC's decision to set up an R&D unit in collaboration with IMEC in Louvain, Belgium, that will mainly focus on production technologies for devices targeting wireless.

By: DocMemory
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