TSMC in collaboration with partners Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, on Tuesday unveiled plans to form a joint venture and construct a chip fabrication facility near Dresden, Germany. The joint venture named European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) will own a fab that will produce chips for automotive, industrial, and IoT applications using TSMC's 12nm, 16nm, 22nm, and 28nm-class process technologies starting from late 2027.
The planned ESMC fab is expected to have a production capacity of around 40,000 300-mm wafer starts per month, though TSMC does not disclose whether by a wafer it means a wafer processed on a 28nm node, or a 12nm process technology. By modern standards, a fab with a 40,000 WSPM is not exactly a large production facility (GlobalFoundries' Fab 1 in Dresden has capacity of well over 100,000 WSPM), but since this particular fab will be used almost exclusively for German and Austrian automakers, industrial equipment producers, and IoT companies, it should be just enough to meet their demands in the latter half of the decade.
