“We have always wanted to move from the back-end — which is on testing and assembly — to the front-end,” Malaysian Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Haslinda Amin on Wednesday. “The government has taken a radical approach” to work with Arm “with the perspective of building the whole ecosystem.”
Arm Holdings has agreed to provide chip designs and technology to Malaysia over the next decade, to help catapult the Southeast Asian country beyond chip assembly and into more valuable semiconductor production.
Malaysia, which packages roughly a tenth of the world’s semiconductors, has inked a pact to pay the SoftBank Group-owned UK firm US$250 million over a period of ten years for a slew of semiconductor-related licenses and knowhow. The government plans to use that to aid local companies design their own chips and target semiconductor exports of 1.2 trillion ringgit ($36 billion) by 2030.
