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My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?
Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war. You might not be able to fabricate billion terraflop GPUs but at least the basics of survival will be able to be locally produced without scavenging washing machines for parts.
The (western) economy runs on sub 7nm phone, laptop and datacenter chips on which the white collar workforce produces value. Those are the ones that are also the most profitable since they have the highest margins. Europe doesn't have that.
My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?
“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.
One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.
EDIT: Apparently it's a different plant. It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder. I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.
I can imagine their pace might be accelerated but better than endless discussions, shuffling and never shipping
My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses I don't like this framing. These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless or "easy". Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extrem…
So basically all major industrial powers? In which case I don't get the use of the world "only" here, as if the EU, the richest block in the world, deserve praise for doing something countries a lot less wealthier are doing.
> and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1].
The way it's framed it sounds like China is some evil bad guy for doing that but that's standard practice that the EU and US also do. The EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China and sanctions Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.
> The plant will produce chips for intelligent power management > The company ... sought to capitalise on the massive AI investment boom These chips are probably very useful and important, but I don't see what they have to do with AI. Does everything need to have the word AI these days?
I think this fab was already in construction before the AI hype, this is just marketing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses I don't like this framing. These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless or "easy". Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extrem…
>Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. So basically all major industrial powers? In which case I don't get the use of the world "only" here, as if the EU, the richest block in the world, deserve praise for doing something countries a lot less wealthier are doing. > and China has already begun embargoing the…
ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners.
Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized.
Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil.
> that's standard practice that the EU and US also do
My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
EDIT: Apparently it's a different plant. It's not just Infineon - it's called the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) and is a joint venture by TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP, with TSMC being the majority (70%) shareholder. I've met one of the engineers designing the piping for that plant. Hardest project to date for him and mainly because TSMC was setting the pace.