Top tier 1 supplier Bosch as a by-product, proves one reason why the semiconductor shortage that has crippled the car industry is taking so long to fix.
This week, the company announced an additional €250 million ($390 million) investment in a planned 3,600-square-foot cleanroom chip production facility at its Reutlingen site.
This is higher than the 400 million euros pledged to similar projects in Germany and Malaysia last October.
“This investment will benefit our customers and help combat the crisis in the semiconductor supply chain,” said Bosch President Stefan Hartung, referring to the latest funding.
The initiator, however, is the new production area that will be financed by the aforementioned 250 million euros in addition which is expected to come online until 2025 – meaning that the critical supply of additional chips remains. many more years to join the worldwide components ecosystem.
This also clearly shows that securing a larger supply of chips is not simply about building new factories and producing them on short notice – something that is in great demand. Bosch has every incentive to do this, if possible.
Overall, cleanroom space in Reutlingen will grow from about 35,000 square meters currently to more than 44,000 square meters by 2025.
Making those spaces clean is a very time consuming and complicated process. In the clean room of the chip factory (fabrication site), air quality and temperature are controlled as the robot transports the cake from one machine to another.
Bosch says it has been developing and manufacturing semiconductors for over 60 years, and for more than 50 of those years in Reutlingen – for both automotive applications and the consumer electronics market (the latter will move into OEM supply). automatically during COVID).
Semiconductor components manufactured by Bosch include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS sensors) and power semiconductors.
The further expansion of the Reutlingen site will primarily serve the growing demand for MEMS in the automotive and consumer sectors as well as silicon-carbide power semiconductors. Chips made of this material are intended to play an increasing role in electrical mobility.
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