Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) is carrying out an environmental impact assessment on land designated for construction of a new plant by TSMC in Chunan, Miaoli (northern Taiwan).

If the deal goes through it will speed up the foundry's IC backend business expansion. TSMC has been very concerned about its backend lately as a few too many things make it look bigger than it really is.

Enhancing its backend packaging capability will help strengthen its competitiveness in the sub-10nm process by fulfilling orders demanding the foundry's CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate) and integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer-level packaging, and its newly-unveiled system-on-integrated-chips (SoIC) and wafer-on-wafer (WoW) packaging services.

In the 2.5D/3D IC packaging segment, for example, TSMC is capable of processing 200,000 wafers monthly using its proprietary CoWoS technology,