Astro Hacker News - Infineon to open fab in Germany as part of sovereignty push

richardstahl |next [-]

Spoiler: I am European.

The title is a bit sensationalist and - unfortunately - misleading. This project was greenlit in February 2023 and is not connected to the recent EU Chips / Data Center / Sovereignty Package that came out in June this year. What is notable is that the EU funding grant of 1bn was officially approved in February 2025.

Technically this is a 300mm power + analog/mixed-signal fab. This means MOSFETs, IGBTs, plus wide-bandgap SiC and GaN devices. No FinFET/GAAFET, nothing in the 5/3/2nm class.

The framing of the article that this is AI-related is questionable. Infineon can market these chips to the AI market or the Automotive or renewable Energy market.

SanjayMehta |next |previous [-]

I've always found it fascinating that ASML is European but the latest nodes come out of Taiwan.

alephnerd |root |parent [-]

ASML the holding company is European, but a large portion of their IP is firewalled within the US or Taiwan, though plenty of IP is generated within Netherlands.

Much of Asia (eg. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines, and now Vietnam+India) as well as the US has spent decades working and financing both backend and frontend semiconductor processes, but European states fell behind in the 2000s and 2010s.

alephnerd |previous [-]

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 |root |parent |next [-]

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.

hammock |root |parent |next [-]

What specifically are they going to make in this fab?

adrian_b |root |parent [-]

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.

alephnerd |root |parent |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.

rsynnott |root |parent |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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.