Europe’s share of worldwide chip markets has fallen below the level which, in 1983, triggered the thinking behind the Megaproject which, followed by JESSI and MEDEA, allowed Europe to catch up with the US and Japan in chip technology.
“There is no end in sight for Europe's market share decline”, said Malcolm Penn, CEO of analysts Future Horizons, at the company’s Industry Forecast Seminar (IFS2008) earlier this week, “it was 19.7 per cent in 2002. In 2007 it was 16 per cent. At the current rate, it will decline to 15.3 per cent in 2012.”
In 1983, European market share was 17 per cent. Subsequently, three visionary CEOs, Jurgen Knorr of Siemens, Cees Krijsman of Philips, and Pasquale Pistorio of STMicroelectronics persuaded Europe's public authorities to help finance a come-back.
The success of those efforts peaked in 1998, when the European chip industry held 23 per cent share of the worldwide chip market.
This year, Europe’s Big Three in microelectronics, decided to give up developing their own core semiconductor technology and buy it in from the US and Asia.
Infineon and STMicroelectronics decided to go to IBM for core process technology, while NXP decided to go to TSMC.
That means Europe will lose the ability to develop basic microelectronics technology after the 45nm process which finished being developed in Crolles, France last December.
“If you lose it, it takes 10 years to catch up”, said Penn, “the first five years of the Megaproject and JESSI were a disaster, but it all came together in the end”.
It was a painful, tortured, hugely expensive, politically fraught catch-up process, but Europe finally got there. Read how it happened, here, on Mannerisms, at 3pm today.
THIS AFTERNOON: How Europe Caught Up In IC Technology, by Jurgen Knorr, CEO of Siemens Semiconductor (now Infineon) from 1984 to 1996.
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