Report: TSMC's Chang says no to buying Renesas fab

LONDON – Morris Chang, chairman of foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., has said his company has no intention of acquiring a wafer fab from struggling Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics Corp., according to a Focus Taiwan news report.

It was recently reported in Japan that Renesas was in negotiations with TSMC that, as well as increasing TSMC's role as a foundry supplier of microcontrollers to Renesas would see it take over a wafer fab in Yamagata and take over the employment of roughly 1,400 employees there.

The move would have been part of massive re-organization that could see Renesas close or sell more than half its domestic factories and trim its workforce by about 12,000 people or 30 percent.

Renesas has been making losses since its formation in 2010 as a joint venture that brought together the chip making interests of Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and NEC. On Tuesday (July 3) the company announced some details of its restructuring including offers to workers to take early retirement or to leave the company for about 5,000 workers. However, plans to trim the company's market engagement and to increase the outsourcing of manufacturing were vague.

Chang said he expects TSMC to provide more advanced chip production to TSMC but that the acquisition of the wafer fab was not on TSMC's agenda, the report said.

In May the two companies announced that they had agreed to extend microcontroller technology collaboration to include 40-nm embedded flash process technology and that in addition TSMC will be able to make the MONOS (Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon) embedded flash platform available to other customers.


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