UMC invests $8 billion in 12" fab

With a voracious smartphone and mobile device market and fierce chip design competition, it's a good time to be a microchip fab company. Worldwide, UMC is second only to TSMC -- and both companies are based in Taiwan. Fabs can't make chips fast enough, and as a result are investing heavily to up production. UMC said today that it plans on spending $8 billion in the first phase of a three-phase project to significantly increase it's manufacturing capacity by moving to 300mm (12") wafer size. Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcomm, AMD -- can we take your order?