Infineon to open fab in Germany as part of sovereignty push

Of course, we cannot know how much truth is in this claim, because nowadays it is fashionable for companies to emit such claims.

The fact that it processes 300 mm silicon wafers makes it unlikely that it also makes SiC or GaN devices, which would require separate production lines.

I believe that it is much more likely that here are made only the silicon ICs used as controllers for SiC and GaN power devices that are made in other factories.

They could also make low-voltage power MOSFETs in this new fab. IGBTs are being replaced more and more frequently by silicon carbide devices, so I doubt that Infineon would need a production expansion for IGBTs. Moreover, IGBTs are made on a different kind of wafers, and I do not know whether those are also available as 300 mm wafers.

For a company that has a great number of factories it would not make sense to build a combined Si/GaN/SiC factory, instead of building separate factories for each semiconductor material, because they are made on substrates that are incompatible mechanically, so they must use separate installations anyway.

They also use different chemicals for various process steps and keeping them in separate factories simplifies the avoidance of cross-contamination between the production lines.

While many microcontrollers are still made on older CMOS processes, to reduce costs, they would benefit from bleeding edge manufacturing processes.

Dresden was where the semiconductor factories of East Germany were located.

After the reunification of Germany, those were terminated, but in their place several new semiconductor factories have been built, including this new Infineon factory, to take advantage of the qualified people and of the close university.

In the past, Infineon also had a DRAM factory in Dresden. But then their DRAM business was separated into an independent company, Qimonda, which went bankrupt a few years later, so the DRAM factory was closed.

Also AMD had a factory there, making Zen CPUs for some years, until they were moved to TSMC, which now belongs to GlobalFoundries.

Not so much anymore, but you'd wonder if it might be something they'd want to get back into, given the current market situation.

Much of Asia (eg. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Philippines, and now Vietnam+India) as well as the US has spent decades working and financing both backend and frontend semiconductor processes, but European states fell behind in the 2000s and 2010s.