In a recent podcast, it was summarized as:
ASM (International) makes machines that add material to a silicon wafer (deposition).
ASML makes machines that remove material from said wafers (lithography, etching)
(I was a bit surprised that's not combined in 1 machine. But let's move on)
Then Besi makes machines to stack / interconnect / package those ICs into a package. I'm assuming pick & place machines are other companies' turf.
The above are all Dutch companies, operating a pretty important section of the tech stack.
Iirc there were (& probably still are) some IC fabs in Europe, but mostly older nodes (like useful for microcontrollers used by car manufacturers. Wikipedia has a list). So for SOTA smartphone SoCs it's off to Taiwan (TSMC), South Korea (Samsung) or China (who makes everything, including smartphones & the chips going in there).
So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check. Money? This is a rich continent.
What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".
But now the important thing: several of such initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and b) confidence that EU can do such things, is growing.
As for bureaucracy / red tape... sigh... (won't be fixed any time soon)
>In a recent podcast, it was summarized as: ....
Yes, all true, and all things I didn't disagree with because I wasn't talking about that.
The point I was talking about you only addressed to some extent in a line below that:
>What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".
Yeah exactly, the EU doesn't have computer manufacturing capabilities (just like I said 5 layers up) and it never will because it doesn't invest and also doesn't attract investors to invest.
>So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check.
No they're not. We don't have the skilled workers for that. Nobody in EU knows how to design Nvidia and AMD level GPUs and Altera and Xilinx levels of FPGAs that power AI datacenters. Nobody in EU knows how to make competitive 2nm fabs, otherwise EU fabs would have already bought ASML EUV machines and updated their ancient processes to the highly more profitable nodes instead of being stuck making cheap legacy nodes for cars and white goods. Those old nodes are still important to have to an extent, but ask yourself, would you rather sell a die for 10k a pop or sell 1000 dies for 10 cents a pop? Would you rather make more money or less money?
> Money? This is a rich continent.
Money is meaningless if you're not using it right. China is pushing to beat the EU and they have less money than the EU.