Its success was further evidenced by being the country’s largest export earner in 2017, totalling RM343 billion and accounting for 36.7 per cent of the total value of exports. Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and the USA were among the markets which registered significant increase in exports of E&E products.
The E&E industry in Malaysia, particularly the semiconductor ecosystem, has critical cross-industry linkages and applications, including new growth in telecommunication and medical devices, as well as Internet-capable industrial technologies and mobile electronic systems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual or Augmented Reality (VR/AR), automotive electronics, wearable electronics, and personal computing.
An exciting new area in the E&E sector is the use of flexible hybrid electronics (FHE), which underlies several new industrial technologies and wearable electronics. FHE makes it possible to produce lightweight, low cost, flexible, stretchable, and efficient smart products with a variety of applications. These include health-monitoring wearables and rugged sensors.
MIDA is ramping up efforts in developing the ecosystem to cater to the growing needs of the E&E industry in embracing Industry 4.0. These include investments in core focus areas such as FHE materials scale-up, thinned device processing, device/sensor integrated printing and packaging, system design tools, and reliability testing and modelling.