Renesas Electronics is mulling plans to sell or shutter 10 of its 19 wafer fabs in Japan, and shift its focus to more microcontroller (MCU) manufacturing, the Chinese-language Commercial Times reported Sunday (July 1), citing Nikkei Business Daily.

Renesas is currently in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), with which Renesas recently announced an extended collaboration, about the sale of its Tsuruoka fab in Yamagata prefecture, the paper quoted Nikkei as saying.

Renesas and TSMC have signed an agreement to extend their MCU technology collaboration to 40nm embedded flash (eFlash) process technology for manufacturing products used in automotive and consumer applications such as home appliances.

In addition, Renesas is also looking to scale down its global workforce by about 30%, or 14,000 jobs, according to the Commercial Times. The company expects to carry out the planned job cuts by the end of September 2012, the paper indicated.

In other news, Renesas today (July 2) issued a company statement that the sale of its Tsugaru fab in Aomori prefecture to Fuji Electric has been completed.