The UK's largest silicon chip factory, in Newport, South Wales, which makes power chips for cars and industry and is owned by the US electronics group Vishay.
The Newport wafer fab makes power semiconductors, chips that control and convert electrical power in cars, industry and other equipment. A fab is a factory that turns discs of silicon into finished chip wafers. Vishay Intertechnology describes the Newport site as an automotive-certified 200 mm wafer facility with capacity of more than 30,000 wafers a month, and as the UK's largest semiconductor fab. Vishay itself makes discrete semiconductors and passive components for automotive, industrial, computing, consumer, telecoms, military, aerospace and medical customers.
The Newport site has a long history. A trade article says it was once the UK base of Inmos, the pioneering British company behind the Transputer parallel computer. In later years it operated as Newport Wafer Fab before being taken over by Nexperia in 2021. After the UK government blocked that takeover in 2022 on national security grounds, Vishay bought the fab in March 2024. The fab is on a 28-acre site and the equipment inside is among the most expensive installations in the UK.
Vishay's stated plan for Newport is to make it a centre for what it calls "Net Zero Transformation", chips that support decarbonisation and electrification. It said it would use the fab to qualify and expand its silicon carbide (SiC) products, such as power MOSFETs and diodes, and to work on gallium nitride technology. It also said it would join the Compound Semiconductor Cluster in South Wales and work with UK universities on power compound semiconductor research. Those are plans stated at the time of the purchase, in March 2024, and the pages we read do not confirm progress.
The company welcomed the fab's skilled workforce when it bought the site but did not give a headcount in the release we read. We did not find a UK culture page, a named UK site leader or staff stories, so we cannot say much about day-to-day life there. The sources describe it as a place where very high yields are achieved: a journalist quoted in a newsletter said average yields are in the very high 90s per cent, among the best for power silicon.
A wafer fab is a large employer of many kinds of people: process engineers who tune each step of manufacturing, equipment engineers and technicians who keep machines running, quality and reliability staff, chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, supply chain and health and safety staff, and the usual finance and human resources teams. Electronics, physics, chemistry and engineering are the typical subjects, and technician and operator roles suit people who like practical work. See Vishay's website for roles at Newport.
Website: www.vishay.com
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