Let integrated photonics and microtechnologies ride their S-curves together

Intel’s announcement that it will build a fab in Germany won’t have come as a surprise to anyone who had been paying the slightest attention to the run-up of the European Chips Act. But the new strategy has produced some surprises as well. STMicroelectronics and Globalfoundries are looking to breathe new life into FD-SOI technology as a CMOS competitor, at least in a number of applications. The Spanish 12.3-billion-euro semiconductor ambitions have raised some eyebrows, too. And most recently, a plan has surfaced to build a foundry in the Netherlands. In Twente, to be precise.

It won’t be a hardcore CMOS foundry, of course. The initiators, a consortium of local (semi-)public organizations, target integrated photonics, microsystems such as MEMS and microfluidics, and combinations of these and other technologies through heterogeneous or back-end integration. The facility would double as a proving ground for – locally developed – equipment to manufacture such systems.