Dutch chip startup claims all-European fab flow – with help from a very American friend

Dutch semiconductor startup Qualinx is claiming a breakthrough of sorts in European sovereign manufacturing thanks to an end-to-end semiconductor fabrication flow it is using for its new satnav chips. The firm, a spin-off from Delft University of Technology, says it has demonstrated that security-critical chips for aerospace, …

[LogicGate]

I am not deep into this matter, but I thought that Infineon also had design and manufacturing in europe?

https://chipsofeurope.eu/team/infineon-germany/

[Len]

Size doesn't matter, usually.

...which we understand is a 12nm node. While advanced, this is some way behind cutting-edge processes such as Taiwanese chip giant TSMC's 2nm N2 process, now in mass production.

I always find these sorts of comparisons a bit strange. Producing semiconductors at 2nm is very expensive and only really makes economic sense for a small number of chips. You want the CPU of a smartphone to produce as little heat and use as little precious battery power as possible. That's is where you take the leap to 2nm.

For 90% of chips, and certainly those in manufacturing processes used outside of Asia, that is not needed. Europe has no smartphone manufacturing plants. Europe produces cars (close to half of all cars sold in the world are European), rockets, aeroplanes, industrial processing machinery etc. that are of strategic importance and for those you don't need, and sometimes purposefully don't want, cutting edge chip manufacturing for applications where reliability and predictability is more important. There is still a huge market for chips made with the (gasp!) 180nm process, everyone will have many dozens of those in devices in their house and car.

I'd go one step further, even in your PC nearly all chips will be made with bigger processes than 2nm as probably only the CPU and GPU benefit from those very small processes. For the majority of chips it's not worth it.

[retiredFool]

Re: Size doesn't matter, usually.

For those smallest chips I think it has to be about volume, massive volume. If the reticle set costs 50M, and you only produce 1M parts, that is 50/part just for the glass.

I'd also add that for defense and satellite, not sure that 2nm node is all that great. The part described in the article was for space, and was on a SOI process. I expect part of the reason

on SOI is for better radiation hardness. I don't think there is a SOI version of the 2nm process, but could be wrong. Frankly surprised they got an SOI down to 22.

As to 180, yeah, it is still a thing for sure. I know people still designing on it. 180 is like cobol or C or Fortran. It is going to be around for decades. Reliable and entrenched.

[Pete Sdev]

In this case, it is GlobalFoundries (GF), an international business with its headquarters in the US...

The pair say that GF's Dresden fab is establishing a European manufacturing flow with funding from the European Chips Act. This will ensure that every step of the production process occurs within the EU, so that no sensitive design data leaves the region.

(Emphasis mine).

If you believe that last statement, I've a bridge you might be interested in purchasing.

The design will be sent/available to head-office in the US. There's also a risk of a TLA "insisting" on design changes at the factory level.

Now admittedly, even if it was 100% sovereign there's still nothing to stop a state actor at least attempting to bribe and/or extort someone at the factory to do the same, but it would be a level of more difficulty.