Worldwide semiconductor wafer foundry leader GLOBALFOUNDRIES published its global manufacturing business expansion plan today. The company will continue investing in its wafer plants in the United States and Germany, expand its capacity in Singapore, and construct a facility to produce 12–inch wafers in Chengdu, China in order to satisfy Chinese and global demands for the company’s 22FDX technology.

According to the cooperation plan of the two parties, the Chengdu plant will start production in Q4 of 2018, with fabrication of the advanced 22FDX to begin in Q4 of 2019.

CEO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Sanjay Jha, indicated that, “From the world-class RF-SOI platform used for wireless Internet devices, to the technical roadmaps of the state-of-the-art FD-SOI and FinFET, they all serve as evidence of the market’s tremendous demands for our main staple and progressive technologies. The construction of the 12–inch wafer plant in the High and New Technology Development Area of Chengdu will be conducive to accelerating our expansion in the Chinese market.”

The High and New Technology Development Area of Chengdu is home to one of China’s most prominent IT industry clusters, hosting a plethora of global IT giants including Intel, Texas Instrument, AMD, MediaTek, Dell, Lenovo and Foxconn, as well as 115 of the Fortune Global 500 companies. In 2016, the High and New Technology Development Area posted total trade amounting to USD 24.9 billion.

On the same day, GLOBALFOUNDRIES also unveiled its brand new trade name for the Chinese market: “Ge Xin“, and announced the establishment of a new joint venture — Gexin (Chengdu) Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Co., Ltd. In Chinese, the name “Ge Xin” shares the same pronunciation as the Chinese word for “innovation” and signifies rebirth, reinvigoration and reform.