Construction of the first European semiconductor plant of Taiwanese contract chipmaker TSMC in Dresden is still underway, yet Infineon is already floating the idea of a second facility. Production board member Alexander Gorski wants a factory in Germany for chip manufacturing with the most advanced structure widths available.
According to Handelsblatt, Gorski expressed this wish recently at the Bavarian Semiconductor Congress. There he said: "The next step must be for TSMC to build another factory with small structure sizes."
Dresden plant focuses on microcontrollers for cars
For the plant in Dresden, TSMC, Bosch, Infineon and NXP jointly founded the company ESMC – turning the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company into the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The consortium is focusing on microcontrollers for the automotive industry, for which coarser manufacturing processes are sufficient.
In a first step, structure widths of 28 to 22 nanometers are planned, to be followed later by 16 to 12 nanometers. Through the integration of non-volatile memory such as resistive RRAM and magnetoresistive MRAM, the site is nevertheless intended to become the world's most advanced facility for microcontrollers.
So far, there has been little demand in the automotive sector for even finer manufacturing technology. Although Intel subsidiary Mobileye, Japan's Renesas, China's SiEngine and Tesla also design processors with 7-nanometer and, in some cases, 5-nanometer structures, these are, according to heise online, marginal phenomena. They are mainly used in advanced driver assistance systems in high-end vehicles.
Server processors already reach structure widths of 2 nanometers, and desktop and notebook variants are expected to follow next year. The question of whether there is demand in Europe for such modern manufacturing technology also arose in connection with the once-planned Intel plant in Magdeburg. Processors, GPUs and other chips are found in every new desktop PC, notebook and smartphone, but are always designed by American and Asian companies.
With Infineon's push, the course is already being set for the coming decade. Should the partners soon begin talks about another semiconductor plant, according to heise online, commissioning could not be expected before 2030 at the earliest – more likely later. By then, demand for advanced chip technology in Europe is likely to have changed significantly.