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Silicon Box is something of a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. The Singapore-based company, which was founded in 2021 by advanced packaging veteran Byung Joon Han and his partners Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai, is promising to revolutionise the packaging of semiconductors through a modular design called a chiplet. 

Chiplets can assemble together different microchips from different vendors, giving the final product, or system-in-a-package, more flexibility to meet customer demands over monolithic microchips, or systems-on-a-chip. They also promise to overcome what some believe will be a slowdown in Moore’s law — which observed that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every two years — by boosting productivity. 

Silicon Box kicked off the production of chiplets at its new facility in Singapore and began shipping finished products to clients in January 2024. For its first foray into international markets, it has chosen Novara, a town located between Milan and Turin in northern Italy, where it is investing €3.2bn to build a semiconductor assembly and test facility. 

Outsourced semiconductor assembly and test companies (known as osats) play a vital role in the microchips value chain: receiving uncut wafers from foundries and integrated device manufacturers to dice them up into individual chips, which they then test, package and ship.  

Strong talent pool

Silicon Box head of business Michael Han, who led the location scouting and subsequent negotiations with the Italian government, tells fDi that the company looked at several countries within Europe but “ultimately, we settled on Italy because we thought that the engineering talent pool was relatively stronger”.

He adds that Silicon Box CEO Mr Han saw the Italian semiconductor ecosystem was “at the stage where Taiwan and Korea were maybe 30 years ago, where he’s seeing a ton of different Italian engineers everywhere working in semiconductors — they just happen not to be in Italy yet”.

However, he says: “Similarly to what happened with Taiwan and South Korea, if there’s a homegrown champion, we believe that this talent will go back home.”

With regard to Novara, Mr Han says: “We were impressed with Piedmont’s infrastructure, relative ease of doing business, institutional partnerships and proximity to end customers, as well as commercial and industrial centres.” The region also has “great potential for talent development”. 

Government support

Silicon Box’s €3.2bn investment has strong financial support from the Italian government, which is planning to cover about 40% of the capital investment with funds made available by the European Chips Act. The company, which reported an equity capital of $347.96m at the end of 2023 and raised another $300m in 2024, is planning to fund the remainder.

“We expect strong cash flows, investors, and long-term low-interest debt financing to cover this funding. The latter two are already in active discussion and garnering significant interest,” Mr Han says. 

Though the company’s investment is a boost for Piemonte’s microchips ecosystem, its plans to hire 1600 people could prove tricky for a regional ecosystem with an estimated workforce of around 3500. 

“We’re already talking to research institutes and universities, and there's been some conversation with our ecosystem partners in design too, to set up an independent design centre,” maintains Mr Han. “We will do big things for the European ecosystem.” 

This article is part of the Special Report:
Piemonte's next industrial horizons
Read more articles from the report