One year after starting up, Perte del chip has achieved one of its most sought-after objectives, ensuring the creation of a microprocessor manufacturing plant in Spanish territory. For 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 its budget, that is, more than 9,000 of the total 12,000 million euros of its budget, are allocated to the construction of manufacturing plants.
Here the first step has been taken with the announcement that La Vanguardia announced this Thursday that the North American chip manufacturer Broadcom will invest 900 million euros (1,000 million dollars) in a plant in Spain. Specifically, it is a factory for semiconductor substrates.
If there are three stages in the manufacture of chips, the design, the manufacture of the wafers 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 an operation similar to the plant that STMicroelectronics will build in Italy, with an investment of 738 million euros, but both are very 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 packaging process of the microprocessors.
The Broadcom plant is expected to start construction at the beginning of the year after completing the administrative procedures, and will be carried out in two phases, the second assuming an expansion of the initial core. In a highly automated process that is estimated to employ nearly 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. A project that fits both in the European Chip law and in the Perte del Chip, point out from Moncloa.
Last November, the Perte Chip commissioner, Jaime Martorell, told La Vanguardia that he was going to attract “one or two manufacturing plants” to Spain. Now, Martorell explains that the Broadcom plant will be in charge of “a highly advanced package 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,” Martorell explains to La Vanguardia. “They are needed for very advanced applications in data centers, data centers, and very advanced and high-value encapsulation technology is required,” says the commissioner. It is in the telecommunications sector where there is more demand for these substrates.
For the First Vice President and Minister of Economy, Nadia Calviño, “thanks to this agreement with Broadcom, Spain is placed on the map of chip manufacturing in Europe”, and she has also pointed out that “it opens the door to other billion-dollar investments” . “I hope that in the next few days we will have some other good news and that we will begin to see the results of this strategy,” Calviño stated.
The race for chips is also a race for subsidies from different countries to attract manufacturers. The supply crisis that was suffered in the post-covid period triggered the alarms and has led the European Union to adopt the Chip law, which plans to add 20% of the world production of microprocessors in 2030. Now, the Spanish Government has already started informally contacts with Brussels to show that this investment by Broadcom follows the parameters provided by the Chip law, which sets the playing field in this field in Europe, and that it is eligible for the aid provided in the corresponding Part. A Part that is the one with the most endowment of the twelve strategic projects approved.
