Chip, will Micron challenge Asml from Japan?
Japan will subsidize Micron with $1.2 billion to secure its microchip factory. The American company wants to bring EUV to the country, a technology currently dominated by the European ASML. All the details
Driven by the goal of strengthening the domestic microchip supply chain, Japan will provide subsidies of up to $1.2 billion (192 billion yen) to Micron Technology, a US company, for the expansion of its factory in Higashihiroshima, a city in Hiroshima prefecture. The funds will come from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, a historically very influential body in Japanese industrial planning.
THE REASONS FOR THE SUBSIDY
Micron wants to build new production lines at its Higashihiroshima plant to begin mass production of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) memory chips around 2026. The Ministry of Economy had already decided to grant the company a subsidy of 4.65 billion yen; chose to increase support “given the importance to economic security of having domestic supply chains for cutting-edge memory chips,” wrote the Nikkei newspaper, which broke the news.
MICRON WILL BRING EUV TECHNOLOGY TO JAPAN
Micron, in fact, wants to install truly cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machinery in Hiroshima. This is a very advanced technology that allows the creation of semiconductors on very small scales. Currently the EUV machinery sector is dominated by a European, Dutch company: ASML .
Micron specializes in memory chips and months ago said it would be the first company to bring EUV technology to Japan. In total, the company plans to invest approximately 500 billion yen in the country.
OTHER SUBSIDIES: TSMC, WESTERN DIGITAL AND MORE
The Japanese government, through the Ministry of Economy, has also allocated a subsidy of 476 billion yen for a factory of the Taiwanese TSMC, the most important chip manufacturing company in the world, in Kumamoto prefecture. Another 92.9 billion were instead allocated to a site in Mie Prefecture managed by Kioxia, a Japanese microchip company, and the US Western Digital, which deals with hard drives.
Japan, Reuters reported, also intends to cover a third of the expenses (40 billion yen in total) for a plant of South Korea's Samsung Electronics near Tokyo: the facility will contain Samsung's first semiconductor packaging line on Japanese soil .
Through business incentives, and more, Japan is pursuing an industrial strategy to return to being an influential nation in the microchip industry: in the 1980s its market share was around 50 percent of the world total, while today it is only about 10 percent.
In June, the Japan Investment Corporation, an investment fund under the Ministry of Economy, announced the acquisition of JSR, a semiconductor company, for approximately 909.3 billion yen. JSR is a very relevant company because it produces photoresists, chemical substances used to make engravings on wafers. Wafers are "slices" of semiconductor material which are in turn necessary for the production of microchips.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/giappone-micron-sussidi-fabbrica-hiroshima/ on Tue, 03 Oct 2023 14:23:42 +0000.