German expertise and components provider Robert Bosch GmbH will make investments one other 400 million euros ($467 million) to increase its chip manufacturing services in response to the continued semiconductor scarcity that has wreaked havoc on the manufacturing of all the pieces from autos and home equipment to non-public computer systems and energy instruments.
The boosted expenditure, which is earmarked for 2022, will go towards increasing operations on the firm’s wafer fabrication crops in Dresden and Reutlingen, Germany, and its semiconductor part facility in Penang, Malaysia. Nearly all of the funds shall be used to extend manufacturing capability on the Dresden website, which the corporate opened in June at a value of €1 billion ($1.2 billion), the only largest funding in its historical past. That facility produces 300-millimeter wafers, a bigger measurement that yields extra particular person chips per wafer.
Round 50 million euros shall be spent in Reutlingen in each 2022 and 2023, the place the corporate has been making semiconductor elements since 1970. There, Bosch will increase its “cleanroom” – a specifically engineered surroundings the place the silicon wafers are made into semiconductor chips – by greater than 4,000 sq. meters (about 43,000 sq. ft), to a complete of 14,500 sq. meters (156,000 sq ft). The enlargement will even create 150 new jobs, in keeping with Bosch.
In Penang, Bosch will assemble a brand new semiconductor check heart, which can enter operations in 2023. The check heart will take up round 14,000 sq. meters (150,696 sq ft) initially. Nevertheless, the corporate has the house — greater than 100,000 sq. meters — on the Penang strip, and plans to ultimately develop all of it.
The large funding comes throughout a protracted semiconductor scarcity that automotive executives and trade analysts forecast will lengthen into subsequent 12 months. Executives from each Ford Motor Firm and Normal Motors informed buyers of their respective third quarter earnings calls this week that they foresee the shortages persisting into 2022, and presumably even 2023.
It’s a smart transfer for the corporate, which not solely provides automakers and different firms, but in addition makes use of its chips in-house for merchandise similar to Bosch energy instruments. It’s additionally excellent news for the European Union, which goals to extend home provide chain resilience by boosting the manufacturing of semiconductors within the EU to one-fifth of the world’s supply by 2030.
