Hsinchu, Oct. 7 (CNA) Dubbed a “health examiner for IC,” Materials Analysis Technology is setting up new laboratories in Kumamoto, Japan and Arizona in the United States to support its “big clients” and eyeing more in the future amid the changing IC supply chain landscape.
In an interview with CNA, Hsieh Yong-fen (謝詠芬), CEO and chairperson of Materials Analysis Technology, more commonly known as MA-tek, observed that the company has benefited from the U.S.-China trade war.
Hsieh said the semiconductor industry has prospered around the world to an extent that would have been hard to imagine five years ago. It has become a national defense industry with governments pushing for their own onshore integrated circuit (IC) production.
MA-tek provides analytical services to a wide range of industries, including the semiconductor industry, materials and equipment suppliers, solar cell industry, and optical communications. However, clients in the IC industry account for 50 percent of customers, according to the company’s website.
As many countries are welcoming investment and construction of semiconductor fabs, Hsieh said the prospect for the development of related industries is promising, and MA-tek, which already has 16 laboratories in Taiwan, China, and Japan, is going to establish more in the U.S. and Europe.
“MA-tek has been a beneficiary of the U.S.-China trade war,” Hsieh said.
The opening of MA-tek’s lab in Kumamoto this September “was not in the [MA-tek’s] original plan,” Hsieh said, though the company did set up a lab in Nagoya in 2019 at the invitation of Toyota Motor Corp. to work with the latter’s network companies.
The chairwoman said the Kumamoto lab is for MA-tek’s biggest client TSMC, Taiwan’s largest foundry company, which chose the location as its manufacturing base in Japan.
The Kumamoto lab is expected to start to contribute to the company’s revenue in the fourth quarter, Hsieh said, adding that there are plans to build at least two more labs in the city.
As Japan also plans to build semiconductor factories in Hokkaido, that is another possible location for future MA-tek investment, the chair said.
MA-tek has also already rented premises in Phoenix to be able to provide service to the TSMC fab in Arizona, Hsieh said.
Hsieh noted that many major TSMC customers in San Jose have also invited MA-tek to build advanced failure analysis labs, and Europe is a “definite destination” but not in the near future.
In China, MA-tek currently has labs in Shanghai, Xiamen and Shenzhen. While China’s development of advanced semiconductor production processes has currently been blocked, there are still abundant opportunities in automotive electronics, Hsieh said, so the company is looking to have labs in other Chinese cities.
Regardless of which country the company establishes a lab, “MA-tek’s aim is to follow clients and garner the greatest benefits by knowing the clients’ industrial operations well and offering corresponding analysis services,” the CEO said.
For example, the services provided to a foundry mainly focus on material analysis and surface analysis for the foundry’s advanced semiconductor production processes and research and development of materials.
On the other hand, when working with IC design companies, failure analysis and reliability analysis are the services most often provided by MA-tek, according to Hsieh.
Reliability analysis is also most needed in places where there are large end-product markets, such as China, where MA-tek has two such labs in Shanghai, she added.
In terms of IC industry, Hsieh said as the production process advances, IC structures are getting more complex as are measuring techniques.
In the early days, the device was planar, but now both FinFET (fin field-effect transistor) and GAA (gate-all-around), the two latest state-of-art transistor architectures developed to further the performance of ICs, are three-dimensional structures, with GAA a hundred times more complex than that of FinFET, according to the MA-tek CEO.
The advancement has made the analysis much more challenging, she stressed, adding MA-tek has had to introduce artificial intelligence in its programs for measuring and made major investments in outside developers to speed up programming development.
On the company’s future prospects, MA-tek’s founding chair said there is still much room for development around the world as there are potential clients in many industries, including biomedicine, metal and textiles.
For example, in Japan where cosmetics and beer are objects of MA-tek’s analysis work.
“A can of beer does not cost much, but testing costs tens of thousands of yen,” Hsieh said of the beer analysis, in which a Japanese client wanted to analyze the size of beer foam to understand how it affects the taste.
Impressed by Japanese companies’ approach to research and development, the researcher-turned-CEO lamented that in Taiwan only the top companies are willing to spend on R&D, probably out of pressure to lead and outperform competitors.
The MA-tek chairwoman said she hopes to expand the company’s network as much as possible in overseas markets to avoid cost competition blindly waged by competitors, reaching every science park around the globe in the same ways as McDonald’s and Starbucks.
