A year after it was launched, the Perte del chip has achieved one of its most sought-after objectives, to ensure the creation of a microprocessor manufacturing plant in Spanish territory. According to the Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, the Broadcom plant opens the door to “billion dollar investments”.
The design and revitalization of the electronic industry and information and communication technologies are also part of the Perte, but 80% of the budget, that is to say, more than 9,000 of the total 12,000 million euros of the budget, went intended for the construction of manufacturing plants.
The first step has been taken here with the announcement made by La Vanguardia this Thursday that the American chip manufacturer Broadcom will invest 900 million euros (1,000 million dollars) in a plant in Spain. Specifically, it is a factory of substrates for semiconductors.
If in the manufacture of chips there are three stages, the design, the manufacture of the slices and the packaging of the semiconductors, the Broadcom plant intervenes in this last phase, that of providing a substrate that must be used to connect the different chips , with a total of up to 300 or 400 connections. It is the function of the substrate that will be manufactured in Spain.
It is a similar operation to the plant that STMicroelectronics will build in Italy, with an investment of 738 million euros, but both are far from the macro project in Germany, in Magdeburg, where Intel will invest 30,000 million euros. While chips will be manufactured in Magdeburg, Spain and Italy are involved in the final process of packaging the microprocessors.
The Broadcom plant is expected to start construction at the beginning of the year, after the administrative procedures have been completed, and will be done in two phases, the second involving an expansion of the initial core. The process, highly automated, is estimated to employ close to a thousand workers. The location has not yet been decided, and it is played between four autonomous communities: Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha. The project fits both the European Chip law and the Perte del Chip, they point out from Moncloa.
In November, the Perte Chip commissioner, Jaime Martorell, told La Vanguardia that he would attract “one or two manufacturing plants” to Spain. Now, Martorell explains that the Broadcom plant will be responsible for “a very advanced encapsulation of very complex chips”. The first of its kind in Europe. “The substrates are manufactured in Asian countries and in Japan because they are very advanced products. They are part of the very sophisticated chip process”, explains Martorell to La Vanguardia. “They are needed for very advanced applications of computing centers, of data, and very advanced and very valuable encapsulation technology is required,” says the commissioner. It is in the telecommunications sector where there is more demand for these substrates.
According to the first vice-president and Minister of the Economy, Nadia Calviño, “thanks to this agreement with Broadcom, Spain is on the map of chip manufacturing in Europe”, and also points out that it “opens the door to other billion-dollar investments”. “I hope that in the coming days we can have some other good news and that we are already starting to see the results of this strategy”, said Calviño.
The race for chips is also a race for subsidies from different countries to attract manufacturers. The post-covid supply crisis set off the alarms and led the European Union to adopt the Chip law, which foresees adding 20% ??of the world’s production of microprocessors by 2030. Now, the Spanish Government has already informally started contacts with Brussels to show that this Broadcom investment follows the parameters provided by the Chip law, which sets the playing field in this area in Europe, and that it can opt for the aid provided for in the corresponding Perte . A Perte that is the most endowed of the twelve strategic projects approved by the Spanish Government.
