Infineon to open fab in Germany as part of sovereignty push

https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/infineon-open-german-chip-fab-225013833.html?guccounter=1

by SanjayMehta • 1 month ago

25 13 1 month ago

sg.finance.yahoo.com

I've always found it fascinating that ASML is European but the latest nodes come out of Taiwan.

alephnerd4• 1 month ago

ASML the holding company is European, but a large portion of their IP is firewalled within the US or Taiwan, though plenty of IP is generated within Netherlands.

Much of Asia (eg. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines, and now Vietnam+India) as well as the US has spent decades working and financing both backend and frontend semiconductor processes, but European states fell behind in the 2000s and 2010s.

alephnerd4• 1 month ago

FYI Infineon primarily develops power electronics, compound semiconductors, and legacy nodes. This is critical but a distinct usecase from fabricating wafers for GPUs and bleeding edge SoCs.

This helps Europe's automotive and industrial sectors from being overly dependent on Asian intermediate parts in this space, which is a much more critical dependency from a NatSec perspective compared to bleeding edge compute.

rsynnott• 1 month ago

They also used to also be big in RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Not so much anymore, but you'd wonder if it might be something they'd want to get back into, given the current market situation.

alephnerd4• 1 month ago

They used to, but memory is now more of a packaging play (eg. HBM) and less of a fabrication play.

EU states are decades behind on backend processes like semiconductor packaging and OSAT as well.

adrian_b5• 1 month ago

It is also an important producer of microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M cores (and of some with proprietary ISAs), though not as important as ST and NXP.

While many microcontrollers are still made on older CMOS processes, to reduce costs, they would benefit from bleeding edge manufacturing processes.

Dresden was where the semiconductor factories of East Germany were located.

After the reunification of Germany, those were terminated, but in their place several new semiconductor factories have been built, including this new Infineon factory, to take advantage of the qualified people and of the close university.

In the past, Infineon also had a DRAM factory in Dresden. But then their DRAM business was separated into an independent company, Qimonda, which went bankrupt a few years later, so the DRAM factory was closed.

Also AMD had a factory there, making Zen CPUs for some years, until they were moved to TSMC, which now belongs to GlobalFoundries.

alephnerd4• 1 month ago

I agree. I'm just trying to point out to HNers that Infineon wafers will end up powering MCUs or Power Electronics, not GPUs.

hammock• 1 month ago

What specifically are they going to make in this fab?

richardstahl• 1 month ago

Spoiler: I am European.

The title is a bit sensationalist and - unfortunately - misleading. This project was greenlit in February 2023 and is not connected to the recent EU Chips / Data Center / Sovereignty Package that came out in June this year. What is notable is that the EU funding grant of 1bn was officially approved in February 2025.

Technically this is a 300mm power + analog/mixed-signal fab. This means MOSFETs, IGBTs, plus wide-bandgap SiC and GaN devices. No FinFET/GAAFET, nothing in the 5/3/2nm class.

The framing of the article that this is AI-related is questionable. Infineon can market these chips to the AI market or the Automotive or renewable Energy market.

adrian_b5• 1 month ago

Infineon representatives have declared that a goal of this fab is to satisfy the greatly increased demand for power supplies and converters in AI datacenters.

Of course, we cannot know how much truth is in this claim, because nowadays it is fashionable for companies to emit such claims.

The fact that it processes 300 mm silicon wafers makes it unlikely that it also makes SiC or GaN devices, which would require separate production lines.

I believe that it is much more likely that here are made only the silicon ICs used as controllers for SiC and GaN power devices that are made in other factories.

They could also make low-voltage power MOSFETs in this new fab. IGBTs are being replaced more and more frequently by silicon carbide devices, so I doubt that Infineon would need a production expansion for IGBTs. Moreover, IGBTs are made on a different kind of wafers, and I do not know whether those are also available as 300 mm wafers.

For a company that has a great number of factories it would not make sense to build a combined Si/GaN/SiC factory, instead of building separate factories for each semiconductor material, because they are made on substrates that are incompatible mechanically, so they must use separate installations anyway.

They also use different chemicals for various process steps and keeping them in separate factories simplifies the avoidance of cross-contamination between the production lines.

Infineon to open fab in Germany as part of sovereignty push

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