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Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems that it is a factory for silicon wafers, which together with "Smart Power" suggests that the main products will be integrated circuits used as controllers for various kinds of power converters and power supplies.
Nowadays, silicon has become restricted to the applications under 100 V, the power devices for higher voltages being preferably made of gallium nitride or silicon carbide.
So this fab is likely to produce controllers for power devices that Infineon makes in other fabs.
Now Infineon has a problem, because they have just been forbidden by China to export gallium nitride devices there, because apparently their GaN devices infringe a Chinese patent. Previously that was an important market for them.
It is said that the opening of this new fab has been advanced by a few months in comparison with the original plan, supposedly to take advantage of the increase in demand for power supplies in AI datacenters, so that the expansion in this new market would offset the loss in the Chinese market.
The same is true for any PC motherboard. Obviously, any PC or server computer also needs a PSU.
So the number of integrated circuits used as power supply controllers is always greater than the total number of GPU chips plus CPU chips.
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.
EU states are decades behind on backend processes like semiconductor packaging and OSAT as well.
On the other hand, in other application domains, like the packaging of power semiconductors, they are at least at the same level, if not more advanced than USA. The same is true for the packaging of chips with up to a few hundred pins.
Historically, a large fraction of the innovations in the packaging of semiconductor devices and integrated circuits have originated in Europe, at companies like Philips, Siemens, Thomson, SGS-ATES, before being adopted also by the US companies, some years later.