In the year 2000, two Valencian engineers graduated from the University of Valencia traveled to the Irish headquarters of the company Analog Devices to do internships. They must have done it so well that the company, upon completion of the training program, invited Professor Javier Calpe to visit the plant and there they asked him if there was a quarry in Valencia.
“They wanted to know if there were more people prepared and we told them yes, of course, at that time we had a research program. They ended up coming to Valencia and hired 17 more people… and there came a time when they chose to open a center in Valencia”, explains Calpe, currently responsible for the Analog Devices design center, located in the Science Park of the Universitat de València.
Almost an “engineering factory” is missing, everyone comes to say. That training is key for the semiconductor sector is the message that is constantly repeated by all the sources consulted, agents of the sector in Valencia who, given its uniqueness and projection, joined forces in 2021 to promote the Valencia Silicon Cluster. They argue that this is a good time to claim a space that could give great opportunities to the local industry.
With this spirit, the initiative emerged from the business and academic environment, in response to the need to generate a position for the Valencian semiconductor ecosystem, also regarding the initiative of the Spanish PERTE of microelectronics, integrated photonics and semiconductors, the PERTE Chip.
The founding core of this initiative includes the companies MaxLinear, Analog Devices, Bosch, ams Osram, VLC Photonics/Hitachi, Das Photonics, IPronics and Industrial Governance, as well as the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia.
“The pool of engineers is not excessively large in the Valencian Community, but we are living a very sweet moment and it would be a shame to miss that train,” Calpe explains. 130 people work at the Valencian headquarters of Analog Devices and the last 35 have entered this past year.
This is also explained by Mayte Bacete, president of the cluster and director of MaxLinear, which has just inaugurated three floors of a building located right in front of its current headquarters, in the Technology Park, because they were beginning to not fit. Literally. They even lack space for their work materials, so this week they struggle and want to give space to new pieces that they need to house in their building and they have only been able to find a way to enter them: opening an entrance from the canteen .
In MaxLinear Valencia they design chips for telecommunications, the part of the chain with the highest added value. And it is something they do not want to lose, which is why the cluster promotes the proposal to create an international semiconductor campus that allows the development of more and more talent, exportable even from the Valencian Community to the rest of the world.
Due to the importance of talent, the cluster promotes a training initiative for the sector, laying the foundations of an International Campus of Semiconductors whose objective will be to convert the Valencian Community, through the participation of the Generalitat Valenciana, the industry, the universities and technology centers, in the national epicenter of strategic actions aimed at training, development, recruitment and relocation of talent.
“If we had a campus, we could bring specialized people from abroad, where there is much more experience in this sector. It is the only way that we can really give the sector a push and continue to grow and start bringing specialized people to train others also from the companies”, explains Bacete, in whose company, MaxLinear, 130 people work, many of them foreigners.
The Generalitat Valenciana supports the proposal. The regional secretary for Sustainable Economy, Empar Martínex Bonafé, explains to this newspaper that “we aspire for our strength in design to grow with associated manufacturing”. Attracting talent to establish industries is one of the ideas articulated by the Valencian Semiconductor Strategy, which was recently supported by the Valencian Parliament.
Martínez Bonafé also explains that another objective is to have facilities that facilitate the development of pilots, as well as a whole program for the development and attraction of talent. “They are all important, but this is the blood of the project, the fact of having talent is key. We know that although we are generators of talent, given how attractive the Valencian territory is now, we do not generate enough graduates for the needs of the industry,” he argues.
But there is capacity, experts note. This is also argued by Henk J. Bolink, tenured professor at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Valencia and who leads the Molecular Optoelectronics Devices Team research group at the Institute of Molecular Science (ICMol), specializing in highly efficient optoelectronic devices for the generation of of energy.
“This would be a perfect place to set up a fab or a semiconductor nucleus. And there is a quarry, there are many young people who want to do university degrees, many people studying new careers, there are new degrees such as physical engineering from the Polytechnic…” says the teacher. With experience in the multinational chemical company DSM as a materials scientist and project manager, he also worked at Philips and from that background he assures that Valencia has a “perfect microclimate for setting up factories”.
Seat-Volkswagen, Hitachi, HP… The landing of large companies with needs for specialized personnel in scientific-technical careers encourages the labor market. And although it agitates the competition, those involved warn that this is also positive.
“The fact that the Volkswagen plant comes to Sagunt and we are committed to a project as large as the one being considered in the semiconductor sector would help to generate synergies, because if there are several entities looking for well-trained people, this gives security and it attracts people from Europe and from Spain itself”, defends Henk J. Bolink.
Javier Calpe agrees with this idea, who argues that the sector is also interested in this hectic competition, since “if you try to attract talent from abroad and then they are not interested in this or another offer, nothing will happen because there are 300 other companies (for put a number) in which they will be able to work”, he values. All in all, for him the key is choosing the projects that the Valencia teams develop, since “growth is a consequence of a job well done,” he concludes.
