Newport Wafer Fab Rebooted With £250M Silicon Carbide Investment

The former Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) facility in South Wales is getting £250 million ($323 million) to start making silicon carbide semiconductors, a year after the sale of the site was approved by UK government.

Britain's largest semiconductor production plant, now officially known as Vishay Newport following acquisition by US chip biz Vishay Intertechnology, is gearing up to produce silicon carbide (SiC) components for use in high-power applications including drivetrain for EVs and wind turbines.

The UK's finance minister, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, is visiting the site today (March 27) and is expected to welcome the investment. The £250 million is coming not just from Vishay itself, but partly from the government's Automotive Transformation Fund (ATF), making up a combination of capex and R&D investment, a spokesperson for Vishay told us.

The funding is to boost production at the factory by adding new SiC production lines. This compound semiconductor material can withstand higher voltages and temperatures than traditional silicon, enabling faster battery charging, a more efficient drivetrain, and longer driving distances.

Vishay's spokesperson said the chipmaking equipment for the production line is arriving, and that assembly is expected to begin "very soon."

This investment will support upwards of 500 highly skilled jobs in the region and hundreds more indirectly in the wider supply chain, Vishay said.

"This is an exciting moment, and the start of our plans for growth in the UK," said Vishay Chief Technical Officer Roy Shoshani. "We can see through the development of the Industrial Strategy and the skilled workforce in Newport that there is a real opportunity to play to the UK's strength in advanced semiconductors, delivering greater economic security and supporting Net Zero."

Newport Wafer Fab was once a manufacturing site for Brit chip biz Inmos, maker of the famous Transputer processor, but was acquired by Dutch semiconductor outfit Nexperia in 2021.

• Nexperia sells Newport Wafer Fab to American chipmaker for $177M
• Newport Wafer Fab blames UK government over 100 redundancies plan
• Nexperia left off subsidies list as Germany chips away at Chinese connection
• Nexperia claims Newport Wafer may close if sale goes ahead

However, Nexperia itself was already owned by Wingtech Technology, a partially state-owned Chinese company, and this triggered the concern of the British authorities.

Using powers gained under the National Security and Investment Act (NSIA) 2021 to retroactively investigate and review the purchase, the UK government insisted that Nexperia put the Newport facility up for sale again, whereupon Vishay agreed to buy it in November 2023.

Elsewhere on the UK chip scene, Pragmatic Semiconductor just launched a new line of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags using near-field communication (NFC). Pragmatic specializes in flexible integrated circuits (FlexIC) that can be incorporated into products or packaging, even on curved surfaces.

EnSilica, a maker of mixed signal application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), said it has won an $18 million design and supply contract from a European customer for an Arm-based mixed signal sensor interface to be used across a range of automotive and industrial applications. ®