by alephnerd | 2025-07-21 05:18:30+00:00
> Microchip has big HW design centers all over Europe)

Microchip is primarily analog and power semiconductors - those have been heavily commodified for decades at this point. And the majority of their headcount and leadership is domiciled in the US and India based on LinkedIn.

And most European domiciled companies like NXP, ST Micro, and Ericcson outsourced the majority of their design operations to India and China 20 years ago.

Most hardware design has been domiciled in the US, China, Taiwan, Israel, and India since the 2000s.

> there is absolutely no reason why the EU couldn't produce/design its own hardware

Because, quite frankly, the ecosystem doesn't exist anymore.

Much of the European semiconductor industry imploded in the 2000s and 2010s due to the recession, austerity, the inability to compete against Apple and Samsung, the inability to hop onto the 5G bandwagon on time, and ASEAN and China's rise as a power electronics, analog chip, OSAT, and Telco hubs.

Much of the presence at this point in Europe is primarily legacy analog and power semiconductors targeted at automotive applications.

None of the EDAs are developed in Europe (even Siemens' EDA is developed by American subsidiaries Altair and UGS - both of whom are airgapped from their European parent). None of the major chemical vendors like Sunlit Chemical or LCY Chemical have a presence in Europe. None of the major lithography vendors like Cymer (the ASML-DoE JV that manufactures EUVs), Tokyo Electron, or Nikon have a lithography manufacturing presence in Europe. None of the major OSAT and Packaging vendors like ASE or Amkor have a presence in Europe. And none of the major display or memory chip fab companies like Sharp, Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron have a presence within Europe. And none of the storage vendors like Toshiba, Hitachi, or Sandisk have a major manufacturing or R&D presence in Europe.

All these companies have overwhelmingly invested within Asia and the US. Europe didn't ratified it's FTAs with South Korea or Japan until 2015 and 2019 respectively, which meant most Korean and Japanese players were easily wooed by ASEAN, Chinese, and Indian SEZs and incentives in the 2000s and 2010s, right at the moment the European ecosystem was increasingly falling behind.

The US-TW-JP-SK-China-ASEAN-India ecosystem is extremely interconnected to a degree that the European ecosystem is not, and this began all the way back in the 2000s.

> say, 15-30 years from now

None of the EU member states nor the EU as a whole have offered subsidizes anywhere near as lucrative as those the US, SK, JP, TW, CN, ASEAN, and even India provided in 2020-25 for fabrication, design, or packaging. And I have not seen any EU or EU member state legislation moving in the right direction.

Hypothetically, if an EU member state suddenly wakes up tomorrow, it would still take 4-6 years to go from subsidy to constructed fab. For design, it would take 10 years (as can be seen with India's RISC-V ecosystem taking 10 years to even reach a mature enough state that allowed Sequoia and Accel to begin funding Series As and Bs). At that point, the legacy chip market will have already been flooded by Asian competitors, and the bleeding edge chip market will have largely been flooded by Asian and American competitors.

At this point, Europe has largely fallen behind in the traditional semiconductor ecosystem and can't catch up in the short-to-medium term.

The only way European players can remain relevant is by investing in opportunities to leapfrog in frontier segments such as 2D semiconductor design, photonics/quantum applications, and composite semiconductors - but even in these segments Europe has fallen severely behind US and Chinese players, and increasingly behind Japanese, South Korean, and even Indian domiciled R&D labs.