Europe Needs Volume FD-SOI Fab To Meet Kroes’ 20% Target.

The cornerstone of the European Leaders Group (ELG) report to Neelie Kroes, due in a week or two, should be the construction of a high volume FD-SOI wafer fab, said Malcolm Penn, CEO of Future Horizons, at the company’s forecast meeting in London, earlier this week.The ELG was set up to devise a plan to implement the 20% European semiconductor market share target in Kroes’ 10/100/20 plan.

The ELG was due to report on December 16th. But instead of a detailed roadmap the EC issued a statement of general aspirations with an undertaking that a detailed roadmap for implementation would be published in late January or early February.

It was widely assumed that Kroes had not approved of the ELG’s report and had set the group to write a new one.

It is thought that the CEOs of the Big Three European semiconductor manufacturers Carlo Bozotti, Reinhard Ploss and Rick Clemmer don’t want to build fabs in Europe – or indeed anywhere else.

And if the three biggest manufacturers won’t expand manufacturing capacity in Europe, how can Kroes get her 20% world semiconductor market share?

“Neelie laid down the marching orders but the troops aren’t marching,” said Penn, “it’s a tough target to get from 6% to 20% – we need something in addition to the existing companies plus GloFo.”

“Building a volume production FD-SOI fab would be one of the most blatantly obvious things the ELG could do,” said Penn, “it should be a cornerstone of the ELG plan. It would be a fantastic thing for them to do.”

Comments

2 comments

simon
24th January 2014 at 3:51 pm

The semiconductor industry has massively invested in FinFet and FinFet high volume production is now a reality. What FD-SOI needs is high volume product, not funding from tax payer money. There has been a unique opportunity with ST-Ericsson who demonstrated great silicon a year ago at MWC. It was the NovaThor L8580, a leading edge SoC for the gigantic smartphone market that had an LTE capable Modem and a stunning 3GHz CPU. Unfortunately, the unwise parent companies pulled the plug and in turn killed the last chance FD-SOI had to live. I’m afraid FD-SOI high volume production will never happen.