[alephnerd]

FYI Infineon primarily develops power electronics, compound semiconductors, and legacy nodes. This is critical but a distinct usecase from fabricating wafers for GPUs and bleeding edge SoCs.

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.

[adrian_b]

It is also an important producer of microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M cores (and of some with proprietary ISAs), though not as important as ST and NXP.

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.

[alephnerd]

I agree. I'm just trying to point out to HNers that Infineon wafers will end up powering MCUs or Power Electronics, not GPUs.

[adrian_b]

Any GPU card also includes a few step-down power converters, which could be made with Infineon controllers and power transistors.

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.

[hammock]

What specifically are they going to make in this fab?

[adrian_b]

This new fab is called "Smart Power Fab", which hints to its purpose, but Infineon has not stated clearly what they want to produce here.

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.

[rsynnott]

They also used to also be big in RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

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.

[alephnerd]

They used to, but memory is now more of a packaging play (eg. HBM) and less of a fabrication play.

EU states are decades behind on backend processes like semiconductor packaging and OSAT as well.

[adrian_b]

They might be behind by at most a decade in packaging dies like those used for desktop/server CPUs or for GPUs, which are no longer produced currently in Europe.

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.