5 ms·

My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?

by petcat 4mo ago

alephnerd 4mo ago
> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses I don't like this framing. These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless or "easy". Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extremely high, as they have significant uses from automotive to PLCs to weapons systems, and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1]. These are dual use technologies and a major reason why both the US and China heavily invested in compound semiconductor capacity in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Edit: can't reply > In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN THEMA Foundries is working in photonics, not GaNs [2]. The GaN initiative (BelGaN) failed and the only two buyers interested in buying out the property for GaN fabrication were a Chinese and Indian player [2]. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shutdowns-due-china-rare-earth-controls-despite-summit-2025-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut... [1] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/china-places-7-eu-entities-export-control-list https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/... [2] - https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2025/apr/belgan-110425.shtml https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2025/apr/belg...
- chicken-stew 4mo ago
  In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. So basically all major industrial powers? In which case I don't get the use of the world "only" here, as if the EU, the richest block in the world, deserve praise for doing something countries a lot less wealthier are doing. > and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1]. The way it's framed it sounds like China is some evil bad guy for doing that but that's standard practice that the EU and US also do. The EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China and sanctions Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.
  - alephnerd 4mo ago
    > So basically all major industrial powers ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners. Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized. Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil. > that's standard practice that the EU and US also do My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
  - petcat 4mo ago
    > EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands. Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
      - alephnerd 4mo ago
        Nope. OP's right (and the only other person other than me who has pointed this out on HN). ASML was one of the founding partners in Albany NanoTech in collaboration with SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s [0][1]. It was out of SEMATECH that DUV and EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML. Much of the underlying IP used by ASML is licensed and firewalled under JVs with the US DoE and/or the SUNY Consortium (primarily their D/EUV light source work) or firewalled and export controlled by Taiwan (primarily their metrology work) Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry. [0] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-research-center/ https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc... [1] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-rd-2/ https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...
imtringued 4mo ago
Germany doesn't design high end SoCs or x86 processors so why would they build a fab for them?
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  Bad take. Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication capacity, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry. Design capacity (basically programming and logic design) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology). Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.
- petra 4mo ago
  Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1]. [1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.
  - ahartmetz 4mo ago
    Siemens has bought together a bunch of EDA tool makers, most notably Mentor Graphics. It doesn't really bring the know-how to Germany, but at least some kind of control over it.
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.
mqus 4mo ago
they may low-density, but low-tech?
blitzar 4mo ago
Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war. You might not be able to fabricate billion terraflop GPUs but at least the basics of survival will be able to be locally produced without scavenging washing machines for parts.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning The (western) economy runs on sub 7nm phone, laptop and datacenter chips on which the white collar workforce produces value. Those are the ones that are also the most profitable since they have the highest margins. Europe doesn't have that.
  - upboundspiral 4mo ago
    Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable. Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value. And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less. The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less. Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW. >people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less. Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now. And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.
seabird 4mo ago
“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  And 3nm CPUs, GPUs, phone SoCs don't have "real world impact"? One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.
  - seabird 4mo ago
    You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago. We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
    - joe_mamba 4mo ago
      >You do not need a 2nm processor to [...] drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. What a silly argument. You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile. Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today. Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan, not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there? >Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago. An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs. By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day. Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard. >We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much. Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".
onel 3mo ago
Still pretty useful to build in EU

My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?

by petcat 4mo ago

My understanding is that these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses?

> these are pretty low-tech chips only for industrial uses I don't like this framing. These aren't logic ICs but that doesn't mean they are useless or "easy". Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. In fact, compound semiconductors and power electronics is one segment where Europe's China dependency is extremely high, as they have significant uses from automotive to PLCs to weapons systems, and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1]. These are dual use technologies and a major reason why both the US and China heavily invested in compound semiconductor capacity in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Edit: can't reply > In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN THEMA Foundries is working in photonics, not GaNs [2]. The GaN initiative (BelGaN) failed and the only two buyers interested in buying out the property for GaN fabrication were a Chinese and Indian player [2]. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shutdowns-due-china-rare-earth-controls-despite-summit-2025-09-17/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut... [1] - https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/china-places-7-eu-entities-export-control-list https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3351292/... [2] - https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2025/apr/belgan-110425.shtml https://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2025/apr/belg...

chicken-stew 4mo ago
In 2024 Belgium closed its only semi fab, which had recently pivoted to GaN.
joe_mamba 4mo ago
>Heck, the only countries with Gallium Nitride fabrication capabilities and knowhow are the US, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and India. So basically all major industrial powers? In which case I don't get the use of the world "only" here, as if the EU, the richest block in the world, deserve praise for doing something countries a lot less wealthier are doing. > and China has already begun embargoing the EU's access to rare earth elements [0] and has begun enforcing sanctions against the EU's aerospace and UAV industry [1]. The way it's framed it sounds like China is some evil bad guy for doing that but that's standard practice that the EU and US also do. The EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China and sanctions Chinese tech in their defense sector. Standard stuff.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  > So basically all major industrial powers ASEAN doesn't have the capacity yet, but this is changing in 3-5 years as Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam have gotten IP transfers from European, Korean and Japanese technology partners. Neither does the rest of the Europe excluding an Ireland-UK-UAE JV called ChipX (but the team is largely located in the US, UAE, Malaysia, and Japan) and the portion of STMicro in France that was part of state-owned Thomson Semiconducteurs before it was privatized. Neither do any of the major industrial states in the Americas like Canada, Mexico, or Brazil. > that's standard practice that the EU and US also do My point is that states need to build domestic capacity where possible. And the EU is not a state. France continued to protect their GaN fabrication IP closely (not even sharing it with Italy despite STMicro being a French-Italian JV), and same with Germany to a certain extent.
- petcat 4mo ago
  > EU also restricts ASML EUV machines to China It's actually the US that restricts ASML from selling EUV machines to China. The EUV light source itself is American technology developed and produced by Cymer in California. ASML was only permitted to acquire Cymer in 2014 under a strict technology sharing and export control agreement with the US government. It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >It's why, for instance, ASML's next generation research lithography machine is currently being installed in upstate New York and not somewhere in the Netherlands. Or more likely because there's already a semi fab in upstate new york and no fabs in the netherlands.
    - alephnerd 4mo ago
      Nope. OP's right (and the only other person other than me who has pointed this out on HN). ASML was one of the founding partners in Albany NanoTech in collaboration with SEMATECH which became the Upstate NY Semiconductor Cluster back in the mid-2000s [0][1]. It was out of SEMATECH that DUV and EUV Photolithography was productionized and licensed to ASML. Much of the underlying IP used by ASML is licensed and firewalled under JVs with the US DoE and/or the SUNY Consortium (primarily their D/EUV light source work) or firewalled and export controlled by Taiwan (primarily their metrology work) Btw, that tidbit has become one of the main vetting techniques I use now to see whether someone is blowing hot air or has actual experience in the Semiconductor industry. [0] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-research-center/ https://www.eetimes.com/asml-to-build-400-million-us-researc... [1] - https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-rd-2/ https://www.eetimes.com/asml-sematech-team-on-manufacturing-...

imtringued 4mo ago

Germany doesn't design high end SoCs or x86 processors so why would they build a fab for them?

alephnerd 4mo ago
Bad take. Design capacity doesn't imply fabrication capacity, as can be seen with Israel and India's comparative dominance in the chip design industry. Design capacity (basically programming and logic design) is orthogonal to front-end fabrication (basically material science and chemical engineering) which is orthogonal to back-end/OSAT (basically materials science and metrology). Only the US and Taiwan have domestic E2E capacity in all 3.
petra 4mo ago
Designing a secure platform is possible within the EU[1]. [1]They need to use US EDA tools, And manufacture masks but maybe there are tricks they won't need to trust them - like inspecting critical parts of the masks.
- ahartmetz 4mo ago
  Siemens has bought together a bunch of EDA tool makers, most notably Mentor Graphics. It doesn't really bring the know-how to Germany, but at least some kind of control over it.
IshKebab 4mo ago
It's not just high end CPUs that use the latest processes. Power, Performance and Area is important to all chips, including microcontrollers, FPGA, etc.

mqus 4mo ago

they may low-density, but low-tech?

blitzar 4mo ago

Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning and weaponry in war. You might not be able to fabricate billion terraflop GPUs but at least the basics of survival will be able to be locally produced without scavenging washing machines for parts.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
>Also suitable for keeping an economy functioning The (western) economy runs on sub 7nm phone, laptop and datacenter chips on which the white collar workforce produces value. Those are the ones that are also the most profitable since they have the highest margins. Europe doesn't have that.
- upboundspiral 4mo ago
  Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable. Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value. And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less. The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less. Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW. >people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less. Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now. And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.

seabird 4mo ago

“Only for industrial uses” is kind of a crazy thing to say when you say it out loud, don’t you think? You might as well say “only for having real-world impact”.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
And 3nm CPUs, GPUs, phone SoCs don't have "real world impact"? One could say they have an even bigger real world impact.
- seabird 4mo ago
  You do not need a 2nm processor to run an engine, perform an ultrasound, drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. The vast majority of the increased processing power we've developed since the mid-2010s gets pissed away rendering 30MB websites or generating AI cheating fruit husband videos. Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago. We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year at never-before-seen speed, but every single day, hundreds or thousands of times a day, you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >You do not need a 2nm processor to [...] drop a missile on someone's head, make 10 million parts in a factory, or fly a plane. What a silly argument. You DO NEED those 2nm CPUs and GPUs to run the CAD and CAE work to design an effective missile and run the battlefield sensor fusion and intelligence data processing to decide when and where to drop that missile. Otherwise if you stay low tech on 20 year old HW, you end up like Russian army today. Look at EU supercomputers that run these tasks along with the computation needed for high-margin EU industries like pharma such as Novo Nordisk, and it all runs on low-nm US chips made in Taiwan, not EU made microcontrollers and mosfets. Where's EU domestic sovereignty there? >Every phone SoC release for the last 10 years combined has done less in the real, concrete world we live in than industrial controls hardware from 30 years ago. An out of touch argument on manipulating a definition of "real work". Work done by industrial controllers isn't "more real" than that done by CPUs and GPUs. By this definition the janitors and handyman in the hospital does more "real work" than the x-ray tech sitting looking at cat videos between looking at x-rays all day. Our economy, yes even in the EU, works on who and what creates more added value to the economy, not whose job is more tough and gritty getting their hands dirty. Work smart, not hard. >We can vibecode SaaS junk that we will have all forgotten about this time next year [...] you brush up against something that was built by an AB or Siemens PLC installed in 2004 that might be slated for decommissioning in a decade or so Again, more ignorance. Jobs on vibe coding a SaaS pays way better in Europe and gets you better perks and working conditions, than writing the code of a PLC. Ask me how I know(former embedded programmer here in the semi industry). Or just look up the salaries on the jobs market. The SW industry just pays way better than the industrial controller HW industry. Yeah, the latter is important too, but clearly not important enough when you see the salaries you're offered, meaning they don't actually value it as much. Your luddite comment just reeks of the typical German/European ignorance and arrogance that made us fall behind the tech race, the EV race, etc leading to the EU losing a lot of GDP and influence on the world stage: "We don't need this battery EV car shit, you can just use diesel engines from 10 years ago", "we don't need this fancy self driving shit, our drivers love driving our cars themselves".

onel 3mo ago

Still pretty useful to build in EU