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You're right, honest mistake. I checked this several times, thinking "surely there aren't two chip plants built at the same time, in roughly the same location with the same company involved?".

Apparently there are.

Very bad marketing since the slop article doesn't even mention the process node of the fab.

>Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning

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.

And 3nm CPUs, GPUs, phone SoCs don't have "real world impact"?

One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.

In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN.

>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 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.

Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1].

[1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.

It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.

Bad take.

Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication capacity, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry.

Design capacity (basically programming and logic design) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology).

Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.

Does AISLER[1] do the same thing as pcbway? They seem to be based in Germany/EU

[1] https://aisler.net/en

They should, but sadly it's extremely difficult for PCB board manufacturing to return to Europe.

EU has FTAs with Japan and SK, and others that dominate the segment like Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India have already unlocked public-private subsidized for the sector.

Additionally, the big players in the industry like ZDT, Unimicron, Nippon Mekatron, Foxconn, Compeq, TTM, and Flex have much stronger financial and political linkages in Asia or the Americas.

This fab itself is important, but was extremely difficult to stand-up and was largely a result of the supply chain issues that the automotive industry faced during zero covid, so it basically took 6 years to execute on this project. That lag-time is the biggest issue unless individual European states decide to take industrial policy their own hands, which becomes expensive very quickly.

Concentrating on building a niche in compound semiconductors as well as 2.5/3D packaging would probably be the best bet for the EU today, but I expect to see French-German industrial rivalry to undermine coordination.

Let's see the state of this project in 5 years. Experience tends to show European projects dragging forever and then suddenly closing whilst funds mysteriously move into semi public companies with boards full to the brim with retired political figures

Yeah, most europeans are not aware how much do we spend on agriculture, pensions and healthcare.