Last but not least, GlobalFoundries officially broke ground on the latest major expansion and upgrade of Fab 1 in Dresden this March to increase capacity for its specialty process technologies, including 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX), embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM), and the BCD (bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) node for power management ICs. To some degree, the upgrade was forced by headwinds that GlobalFoundries faced when building the €10.4 billion joint fab with STMicroelectronics in the Grenoble, France, region.
With numerous semiconductor fab projects in place in Europe, ASML will continue to sell its tools to companies in the EU for years to come; the semiconductor industry is far from dead in the bloc. Of course, the important detail is that all of these production facilities are built by multinational corporations (sometimes in collaboration with local companies) — but this is largely a global trend rather than a major issue.
Although the fab projects in Europe are large in terms of investment, they pale in comparison with those being built in Taiwan, South Korea, the U.S., and Japan, where tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in new semiconductor production facilities.
What is perhaps more important from ASML's standpoint is that none of the ongoing fab projects in Europe are leading-edge fabs set to use EUV and eventually High-NA EUV lithography scanners. The tools that European fabs use today and that new facilities are set to use in the future are mature tools that cost considerably less than advanced EUV or immersion DUV scanners. This is perhaps a concern for ASML, as the company is naturally interested in selling its more sophisticated and expensive equipment.
Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
GenericUser2001 Even with government subsidies, its just hard to get anything done in Europe these days. The best way to phrase it is that Europe is the sick man of Europe. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/asml-says-its-sells-absolutely-nothing-in-europe-calls-on-eu-to-help-create-demand#main
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