Intel's semiconductor testing and packaging facility in Vietnam has been in operation since 2010, and the company has gradually redistributed orders from similar facilities in China and Malaysia, allowing it to process increasingly advanced products. If at first everything was limited to not the most modern chipsets, then last year 14-nm Coffee Lake Refresh processors began to roll off the assembly line of the Vietnamese enterprise. The processor dies themselves were manufactured in other countries; in the Asia-Pacific region, Intel only carries out their mounting on a substrate and output quality control.
Some time ago, Intel decided to concentrate the final stages of production of a number of chipsets in China, and the following products left the assembly line of the Vietnamese enterprise: Intel Q87, Intel H81, Intel C226, Intel QM87 and Intel HM86. However, recently, after a sharp reversal in US customs policy, Intel has additional incentives to redistribute production orders against Chinese enterprises. It is worth adding that in terms of technology, the PRC trusted more than Vietnam, because it is in China that the factory for the production of solid-state memory is located, which deals directly with the processing of silicon wafers, and not just deals with testing and packaging.
So, this week Intel distributed , in which she told about the decision to return to Vietnam part of the orders for the packaging of the above chipsets. To be more precise, the Vietnamese facility will focus on assembling chipsets like the Chinese facility, but only the China facility will continue to test finished products. Despite this, the deployment of Vietnamese facilities for a number of operations will allow Intel to classify the relevant products as manufactured in Vietnam, even if the final inspection of the same products will be held in China.
Breaking the integrity of the production cycle on a geographical basis, Intel probably decided because of the desire to reduce dependence on increased duties on products imported into the United States. However, the listed Intel chipsets are unlikely to enter the US separately from the motherboards and laptops on which they are based. More complex products in which they are included may have other countries of origin.
Deliveries of products from Vietnam will resume from June 14 this year. In parallel, deliveries of chipsets from China will continue, but Intel will be able to more flexibly regulate logistics depending on current priorities. In fact, many US companies that order testing and packaging of their products outside the country can do the same. Moreover, higher duties do not apply to products of Taiwanese origin.
Source: 3dnews.ru