By Li Panpan

With uncertainties in geopolitical changes, some leading laptop brands and automakers recently requested suppliers of mature process IC to stop using wafer foundries in the Chinese mainland and transfer production capacity to others like UMC and PSMC, said Economic Daily News in the Taiwan region.

American companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard took the lead, and first-line PC brand manufacturers in the Taiwan region, and major automobile manufacturers have followed suit.

UMC and PSMC have benefited greatly. Both of them said on November 4 that the number of inquiries on their mature manufacturing processes had increased a lot. UMC said its Singapore factory was getting more popular. The automotive-grade chip business in the current quarter is on the rise as well. The trend will continue in the long term, according to the Economic Daily News.

Frank Huang, chairman of PSMC, said that 80% of its automotive chips come from mature processes above 28nm and the other 20%, 14nm process, and PSMC will also benefit from the trend.

The most critical ICs for notebooks are CPUs, GPUs, and Netcom chips, most of which are produced by advanced manufacturing process companies such as TSMC and Samsung.

But some components, such as driver ICs and power management ICs used in automotive-grade chips and notebooks, are produced by wafer foundries in the Chinese mainland, such as SMIC, said the Economic Daily News report.