United Microelectronics, the world’s second largest contract chip maker, plans to open an office in India dedicated to working with chip design customers on their products, as well as developing new chip talent in the country.
The center, to be located in India’s Hyderabad Technology Park, will serve international clients operating in India as well as local customers, UMC said in a statement on Thursday.
“India also represents a strategic geographic location for a new office due to its potential for becoming the next major market for the consumption of IC [integrated circuit] products,” UMC said in the statement.
UMC manufactures chips developed by customer companies, such as Xilinx of the United States. The contract chip making industry was born from the need to figure out a way to offload the huge cost of building a semiconductor factory, which held many young companies back. Chip plants used to cost around US$1 billion, but a state-of-the-art factory can now run as high as US$3.5 billion, a huge bill for a new company to finance. Xilinx, for example, doesn’t own a chip factory, instead farming out production to UMC.
Contract chip makers such as UMC and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) take care of the manufacturing, including building and maintaining factories, so their customers can focus on developing chips for specific products, such as PCs, mobile phones or digital music players. Today, contract chip makers and their customers must work closely together on new chips because manufacturing a semiconductor is often as hard as designing it in the first place.
TSMC announced the opening of its first India office in February, located in the city of Bangalore. At the time, the company noted that there are over 100 advanced technology design centers in India.
UMC said the India office will speed up chip development and time-to-manufacturing for new chips. It will hire local engineers to work in the office.
The company also has offices in the United States, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
