Comment: Can Germany keep Europe in the FD-SOI game?

German chancellor Angela Merkel on a visit to Infineon’s Dresden fab

With FD-SOI now being proposed as the next generation semiconductor process technology, the epicentre for semiconductor manufacturing in Europe is shifting to Germany.

With the eclipse of both STMicroelectronics and NXP as major European manufacturers of chips, the new momentum for investment in wafer fabs seems to be coming from Germany alone.

That is if we class Imec in Belgium and France’s CEA-Leti as advanced semiconductor research facilities rather than commercial IC production wafer fabs.

In the past five years, Infineon has invested around €600m in its Dresden fab.

This month international chip foundry Globalfoundries extravagantly heralded the opening of “a new chapter in the Silicon Saxony story, building on almost 20 years of sustained investment in Europe’s largest semiconductor fab”.

The reason for this was a $250m investment in its fab in Dresden for development and initial production of its 22nm FD-SOI (full-depleted silicon-on-insulator) process technology platform called 22FDX.

This is significant because FD-SOI is now being proposed as the next generation semiconductor process technology which, like the finfet alternative being championed by Intel, is expected to drive chips to sub-10nm geometries.

Some observers believe that within five years volume digital chip production will be a square contest between finfet fabs and FD-SOI fabs.

Intel, Samsung and TSMC will be main protagonists with their wafer fabs in the US and Asia.

Globalfoundries is vying to be a prat of that fight. Its main fabs are in the US, courtesy of the IBM fab acquisition.

However, Globalfoundries alone of the big four chip manufacturers does not seem to have given up on Europe. As its continuing investment in FD-SOI capacity in Dresden demonstrates.

Globalfoundries has invested more than $5bn in the Dresden fab since 2009.

This would seem to make the European Commission’s grandiose but somehow directionless plans to create a European wafer fab irrelevant. NXP and ST do not seem than keen on the idea.

NXP is looking global with its acquisition of Freescale and ST has more pressing concerns at home.

So the EC’s only credible option seems to be to channel any chip investment it is prepared to make into the fabs in Dresden, Germany. This would seem unlikely.

So if Europe is to have the wherewithal to make sub-14nm FD-SOI chips in the future it looks like being in Germany, and largely thanks to the commitment of an international foundry, which unlike most other chips firms has not given up on making advanced chips in Europe.

 

Richard Wilson

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