Engineers at GlobalFoundries’ hub in Penang can watch every wafer fab the company operates and can stop a machine mid-run, the company’s Asia-Pacific manufacturing chief said. “That place actually controls my machine,” Tan Yew Kong told Tech Wire Asia and another publication in a group interview at Innovate Together 2026, the annual semiconductor forum organised by A*STAR in Singapore on 25 September. “They can actually stop the machine from running.”
Tan is senior vice president and general manager of GlobalFoundries’ Asia-Pacific manufacturing and its Singapore site. At the same forum, GlobalFoundries and A*STAR set out a deeper research partnership on silicon photonics, one of several collaborations announced as Singapore gave its chip sector a national identity, according to The Straits Times.
The Penang site belongs to Global Fab Engineering Services, a programme GlobalFoundries began in Bengaluru in 2015 around yield analytics and making each process step line up with the next. Penang opened in 2023 and took on manufacturing operations and process engineering. Engineers at both hubs qualify tools, classify defects, monitor statistical process controls and take wafer decisions remotely, while manufacturing itself stays in the fab.
GlobalFoundries opened the Bayan Baru site with about 300 engineers and technicians, US$1 million invested in the control tower and up to US$7 million set aside for training over three years, Bernama reported at the time. The company picked Penang for the pool of engineers with semiconductor backgrounds in the state.
The fabs those engineers cover sit in three countries. Fab 8, the 300mm plant, is in Malta, New York, and Fab 9, the 200mm plant, is in Essex Junction, Vermont. Fab 1 is in Dresden, while Fabs 2, 3, 5 and 7 are at Woodlands in Singapore. Penang supports all of them, Tan said. The hub runs on a platform called the Factory Control Tower, which ranks machines by how badly they hold up production and flags material likely to run into trouble over the next 12 hours so the incoming shift can act. He said it covers more than a thousand machines.
Tan said the work is not assembly or test, and that nothing was shifted out of Singapore. “We did not take away the manpower in Singapore to put into that,” he said, because fabs still need people on the floor for physical maintenance.
The hub exists because the talent could not be moved. “I cannot find enough people in Singapore. That’s my first problem,” Tan said. “Same thing in Dresden. Same thing in the US. Talent availability is a big headache.” The engineers he wanted were also unwilling to relocate. “Today Malaysia has quite a bit of semicon talent,” he said. “But they may not want to leave their hometown.”
That reverses the pattern of an earlier generation of Malaysian engineers. Loges Kumar Moganathas, now a senior research engineer at A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics, left Penang for Singapore in 2010 after a recruitment drive reached the state two years earlier. Professor Yeo Yee Chia, an A*STAR deputy chief executive, said the semiconductor talent shortage is acute in Singapore and in Malaysia alike, and called the two countries “quite integrated”.
GF Singapore employs more than 4,300 people across 22 nationalities and turns out 1.25 million wafers a year in 300mm-equivalent terms. Tan said the Penang arrangement means Singapore does not have to hire in proportion when capacity grows there, and ended with a verdict on the local workforce: “For our presence in Malaysia today, we are very impressed with the engineering.”
