The leading pure-play foundry has in recent years adopted a fab construction strategy that builds fabs in advance of actual customer demand or capacity limitations from existing facilities. Within the last month, the company announced that it had started production at Fab14 Phase II, which is an identical fab to Fab14 Phase I, four years after both fabs were built at the same location in Tainan, Taiwan.

TSMC is also building a ‘mega' 300mm fab, dubbed Fab 15, which is estimated to have a capacity of 100,000 wafer start per month, more than twice that of its existing 300mm facilities.

News reports have also suggested that the location for the new facilities is in a new area of the Hsinchu Science Park, which is the original location for many of Taiwan's chip manufacturers, but has long been fully occupied resulting in several more parks being established within the country.

Though completion of the new fabs could typically occur only 12 months later, depending on the size of the facilities, it would be common now for TSMC to only carry out cleanroom fit-out and move to partially tool install when demand was justified.