[riedel]

Germany used to have a semiconductor industry like Intermetall (acquired by micronas acquired by TDK). The problem is that IMHO German automotive industry is not willing to pay a cent more than necessary.

They do only care about short term profit. They triggered the chip crisis in Germany by stopping there orders and then restocking. I am not sure if any government can fix this.

[kken]

>Germany used to have a semiconductor industry like Intermetall (acquired by micronas acquired by TDK). The problem is that IMHO German automotive industry is not willing to pay a cent more than necessary.

How about the three fabs that Bosch has in Germany? Or Infineon, X-Fab, Globalfoundries, TI, Prema, Elmos (now Siltech), Vishay, Nexperia?

[formerly_proven]

Silicon on hacker news pretty much always means latest and smallest logic node, because most commenters aren’t aware of semiconductor applications beyond computer parts and assume everything is about 7 5 3 nm because that’s what gets in the news.

[riedel]

Sorry for being imprecise: I ment a much larger specialized semiconductor industry, that did not survive the market pressure. True that Bosch, Osram and Siemens (now Infineon) have survived. But I think things like RAM production moved out of Germany. Global foundries (formally th AMD fab) is an example of a non-European company, although certainly there fabs and are no clones of US fabs. However, afaik the industry used to be much more diversified and innovative at a time. Actually there is still some interesting exception in the list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...

[lrem]

Which of them can make a 2010-level ARM chip?

[kken]

GF in FDX22, possibly also with eMRAM noadays. Surely not sure fathers 2010 cmos process...

[morsch]

Infineon doesn't count?

[ezsmi]

And there's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Fab

"The X-FAB Silicon Foundries is a German group of semiconductor foundries, with headquarters in Erfurt (X-FAB Semiconductor Foundries AG is located in the south east industrial area between Melchendorf and Windischholzhausen). The group specializes in the fabrication of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for fabless semiconductor companies, as well as MEMS and solutions for high voltage applications."

And:

https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/03/apple-to-invest-ov...

"Apple will invest over 1 billion euros in Germany and plans European Silicon Design Center in Munich"