TSMC Begins Construction of Dresden Fab in August

The €10 billion fab, known as ESMC, is a joint venture with minority stakes held by Bosch, Infineon, and NXP Semiconductors. The start of the build will be marked by a ground-breaking ceremony that will be attended by TSMC chairman and CEO CC Wei, according to Nikkei Asia.

The event will see TSMC play host to equipment and material suppliers, customers, and government officials. It comes as a positive sign of TSMC's commitment to press ahead in Europe after stories had circulated that the project faced delays due to the slowness of the European Commission in signing off on European CHIPS Act subsidy payments.

The ground-breaking may demonstrate commitment, but groundworks and construction of the building shell are a relatively small part of the expenditure, leaving TSMC free to speed up or slow down progress depending on market conditions and the receipt of support from Germany approved by the European Commission.

The planned fab is expected to have a production capacity of 40,000 300mm-diameter wafer starts per month using TSMC's 28/22nm planar CMOS and 16/12nm FinFET manufacturing processes. The plan of record is for construction to start 2H24 and for production by late 2027.

While some automotive customers may be happy with these "behind-the-leading-edge" manufacturing nodes, TSMC has been working on an automotive version of its 3nm manufacturing process – the N3AE process for "automotive early". European politicians and companies working on AI and high-performance computing chips would also like to see TSMC quickly move to 6nm and 3nm. Even those processes will be behind the leading-edge in 2027.