德国半导体工厂建设正当时

2026-02-05 EE Times

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The common notion is that the semiconductor industry practically left Europe because of the high (labor) costs. But that’s not the real reason. It requires huge investments and backing from financial institutions and large companies. When you look at Germany in the 1990s, Siemens could finance such factories, but even then, it was still too small. That’s why the semiconductor business eventually spun off.

It’s a similar story across the globe: If you look at the top three DRAM manufacturers of the past 50 years, you will see the names of about 30 companies. Most of them exited the memory market, were acquired, or went bankrupt. The only exceptions are Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. However, two of them were close to bankruptcy twice.

And it’s not that most of these companies were incompetent and doomed to fail; it’s because, in the long term, they couldn’t compete with companies that benefited from subsidies from governments that saw the strategic relevance of semiconductors.

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What’s different this time?

The world now sees the importance of the semiconductor industry for the global economy. The supply chain crisis in 2022 revealed the dependence on this industry, as industrial equipment worth millions of U.S. dollars could not be delivered because a handful of chips could not be supplied. That’s when we saw Chips Acts emerging across the globe to encourage the construction of local semiconductor factories.

But more importantly, geopolitical tensions have increased in recent years. Custom regulations and tariffs are changing rapidly, and political alliances that have been stable for centuries are now crumbling. So really, it is now or never.

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Revived investment strategies

The industry has evolved dramatically in the past 15+ years, and a lot of capital, talent, and infrastructure is concentrated in Asia and the U.S. To revive the memory industry, the European Chips Act is taking effect.

This now provides the unique opportunity to bring back the complete semiconductor memory supply chain to Europe.

We already have wafer manufacturing in Europe. Bosch is one example: It has wafer manufacturing facilities in Germany that produce 200-nm and 300-nm wafers and is expanding its capacities in Dresden. These nodes are essential for semiconductors for the automotive, medical, and automation industries.

GlobalFoundries also plans an expansion in Dresden that will increase production capacity to more than 1 million wafers per year by 2028. This will make GlobalFoundries the largest site of its kind in Europe. What’s more, this plant will have the capabilities to stack memory on top of a logic chip, a technology used to power AI compute platforms.

These types of chips need packaging, a capacity that we now also have in Germany: Last year, Swissbit announced that it offers advanced packaging services in Berlin. This packaging foundry is a big step toward Europe’s technological sovereignty in semiconductor manufacturing.

Now, we only need to re-establish memory manufacturing in Europe. And the pivotal role that memory plays in all AI strategies and applications opens huge opportunities, especially for emerging memory technologies.

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Hafnium oxide’s promise to the memory market

DRAM and NAND, both dominant memory technologies, have imperfections. That’s why there have been numerous attempts to replace these technologies with emerging memory, such as ferroelectric memory.

Like most emerging memory technologies, hafnium oxide (HfO₂) is also not “new”: The material has been researched for many years and is well-understood.

Ferroelectric Memory Company (FMC) has already developed a sophisticated circuit design that realizes commercially highly attractive product specifications with current memory cell technology.

As HfO₂ is 100% CMOS-compatible, unlike traditional ferroelectric materials, FMC has found a way to easily integrate with the current process of DRAM wafer factories—easy because it doesn’t require much process adaptation. Therefore, a market introduction in the near future is very likely.

However, new memory players cannot compete with the big suppliers on cost or high-volume consumer products. The strategy needs to fill the gaps that they leave untouched. That’s what FMC, which has recently secured funding, aims to do with its unique HfO₂-based memory products.

The fresh capital for its fabless operation will accelerate the commercialization of its DRAM+ and 3D Cache+ memory chips to enable the global ramp-up of AI data centers.

This marks a real opportunity to fill the void left by Qimonda and bring semiconductor memory back to Germany.

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Semiconductors are a marathon

While this is an important milestone, relocating the semiconductor industry back to Europe, and specifically to Germany, requires a long-term commitment. The semiconductor industry has always been volatile.

Any semiconductor company will need to get the same level of support that other markets are providing to their semiconductor manufacturers to help them gain ground and set up for sustainable success.

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