Semiconductor History | Dafa 3, 14 November 2020 — YAGEO Turns Acquisitions into a Kaohsiung Factory

On 14 November 2020, ceremonial spades entered the ground for YAGEO’s Dafa 3 plant in Kaohsiung’s Daliao District. The company described it as its first new Kaohsiung factory in fifteen years. The timing mattered. Five months earlier, YAGEO (國巨) had completed its US$1.6 billion acquisition of KEMET, adding a century-old capacitor maker with factories and engineering teams spread across three continents. Dafa 3 was where part of that enlarged group would become physical capacity in Taiwan. Plans called for a global MLCC research center and high-end production drawing on product and process knowledge gathered across the group. Contemporary reports put the building at 26,000 ping of floor area, with two basement levels and eight floors above ground. Once production equipment was included, the announced investment approached NT$20 billion. The initial production plan centered on multilayer ceramic capacitors, or MLCCs. These tiny parts store and release charge through alternating ceramic dielectric and metal-electrode layers, and are used throughout complex vehicles and communications systems. The proposed mix moved beyond commodity components: high-capacitance parts for smartphones, high-voltage industrial capacitors, high-reliability automotive grades, and high-frequency parts for 5G equipment. At full build-out, Dafa 3 was expected to add 20 billion MLCCs a month and lift group capacity toward 100 billion. The groundbreaking therefore marked more than factory expansion. YAGEO had spent years buying product lines, patents, customer relationships, and engineering groups abroad; Dafa 3 translated part of that corporate geography into a manufacturing and research site in southern Taiwan. The schedule announced in 2020 targeted production in October 2022. Government records instead show the factory registration approved on 7 June 2023, a useful reminder that a groundbreaking date records a commitment, not the day machines begin shipping parts. The registered plant now operates at No. 35 Huadong Road. Behind that active industrial gate stands the factory built to reproduce the layered structure shown in the cover, at a scale announced in tens of billions per month. The cover is a technical illustration of a generic MLCC’s internal ceramic and electrode layers, not a photograph of YAGEO’s plant or products. Illustration: Elcap, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons