Bosch former executive heads TSMC's German unit

Berlin, Jan. 4 (CNA) Christian Koitzsch, former head of Robert Bosch GmbH's wafer plant in Dresden, is now serving as the president of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s (TSMC) subsidiary in Germany, according to the CEO of Silicon Saxony, an industrial group in Germany.

In a LinkedIn post on Thursday, Silicon Saxony CEO Frank Bösenberg said Koitzsch had switched jobs in the new year to become the president of European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (ESMC), a joint venture of TSMC, auto part maker Bosch and IC suppliers Infineon Technologies AG, and NXP Semiconductors N.V.

As the CEO of ESMC, Koitzsch is expected to supervise the building of an advanced wafer fab in Dresden as part of the joint venture. ESMC is scheduled to break ground on the fab in the second half of this year.

Koitzsch, a physicist, held different roles at Bosch and had headed the company's Dresden Bosch plant since July 2021.

That plant is well known for its advanced automation production in rolling out auto industry chips and has been dubbed the most sophisticated wafer fab in Europe. The new TSMC fab will be located next to it.

In August 2023, TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, announced it would team up with Bosch, Infineon and NXP to set up ESMC, in which the Taiwanese partner would hold a 70 percent stake and the three foreign partners would own the remaining 30 percent.

It will be the first TSMC production base in Germany, with mass production slated to begin at the end of 2027.

Germany had promised TSMC 5 billion euros (US$5.47 billion) in subsidies to support the plan to build the 10-billion-euro semiconductor fab in Dresden through ESMC.

However, on Nov. 15, the Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled that the German government's decision to reallocate 60 billion euros of unused funding from pandemic support measures to its Climate and Transformation Fund in 2022 was unconstitutional.

Some of the 60 billion euros had been designated to go to subsidies in support of investments by companies such as TSMC and Intel Corp. in Germany.

The court ruling had raised questions over whether the German federal government would be able to deliver on its subsidy promises until Michael Kellner, parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, said in mid-December that the subsidiary issue had been resolved following a month of negotiations.

Kellner emphasized that TSMC and Intel's investment plans were critical to long-term economic development in Germany.

As part of its global expansion efforts, TSMC's fab in Dresden will use the 12 nanometer, 16nm, 22nm, and 28nm processes to produce chips for automotive electronics and specialty industrial devices.

TSMC is also building two fabs in the U.S. state of Arizona and another in Kumamoto, Japan.