GlobalFoundries opens S$5 Billion wafer fab expansion facility in Singapore to output 1.5 million wafers annually

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GlobalFoundries opens S$5 Billion wafer fab expansion facility in Singapore to output 1.5 million wafers annually

Aerial view of GlobalFoundries’ Singapore new expansion facility. (Image source: GlobalFoundries)

Intel might not have a plant in our garden city-state, but several other players, such as GlobalFoundries, Siltronic, and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) have entrenched semiconductor operations in Singapore.

GlobalFoundries (GF) is the latest to bring good news and create 1,000 high-value jobs in Singapore. First completed in June 2022, GF has just announced the official opening of its S$5 billion expansion of its current wafer fabrication facility, adding over 23,000m² of clean room space.

The new facility will boost GF’s global manufacturing footprint and reinforce its ability to deliver product security and flexibility to customers across its manufacturing sites on three continents (including its Germany and US sites). As Singapore’s most advanced semiconductor facility to date, the expansion fab will produce an additional 450,000 wafers (300mm) annually, raising GF Singapore’s overall capacity to approximately 1.5 million wafers (300mm) each year.

We are thrilled to ramp our operations at the Singapore expansion site. This site is instrumental in ensuring that we have the capacity our customers need as they seek to strengthen their supply chains. -- Dr. Thomas Caulfield, President and CEO of GlobalFoundries.

In recent times, there has been a massive shortage of semiconductor production capacity due to the ripple effects of the pandemic era, as well as the massive demand in telecoms, IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, smart factories, cloud computing and more, straining existing supply chains for chips of all kind to address the processing power demands of modernization and new expectations such as AI in the cloud and at the edge. This is why Globalfoundries announced in 2021 that it would expand and invest in building a chip manufacturing plant in Singapore to meet the new demands.

GlobalFoundries’ grand opening of its Singapore expansion facility on 12 September 2023. (Image source: GlobalFoundries)

Keen readers following HardwareZone might recall that GlobalFoundries' was born out of AMD spinning off its manufacturing assets into a separate entity. They've since acquired IBM microelectronics' business, as well as Charted Semiconductor, to become the fourth largest semiconductor foundry in the world.

With GlobalFoundries' new expansion facility, Singapore’s current total semiconductor output of 11 per cent of the global semiconductor market is only set to grow, thus helping to meet the country's goal to expand its manufacturing sector.