IMEC leads the world in chip research. While cutting ties with China, it can only thrive by working with democratic allies.
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On the outskirts of the medieval town of Leuven, not far from a 15th-century Gothic Town Hall and the towering 15th-century Gothic Saint Peter’s Church, stands a shining modern tower, home to the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre, or imec. It’s not a typical high-flying tech unicorn. It is a non-profit research center that grew out of one of the world’s oldest universities, KU Leuven.
This unique institution provides cutting-edge tech for the world’s most advanced chipmaking. As governments around the world race to bolster their semiconductor industries, they covet the knowledge generated here and fear it ending up in the wrong hands. Imec’s leadership has responded by winding down ties with China, while boosting links with the US, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
“De-connecting” is impossible, CEO Luc Van den Hove tells a small group of visiting journalists. Various regional strengths power the global semiconductor industry. The European Union leads in imaging equipment required to manufacture chips. The US leads in design. Taiwan leads in advanced manufacturing. Japan leads in wafer fabrication. China dominates the refining capacity of many needed raw materials, such as gallium and germanium. Modern chip production involves more than 1,000 steps, 300 materials, and up to 16,000 suppliers, crossing borders as many as 70 times. This complex supply chain is vulnerable to disruptions, with more than 50 choke points.
Within this global chip orchestra, imec occupies a unique position as orchestrator. It doesn’t produce chips. It tests and validates technology. Inside the modern headquarters, researchers work with cutting-edge tools and prototypes. Employees take an “air shower” before entering the “clean room.” Holes in the room surfaces keep dust from settling, while air pressure and a cutting-edge filtering system keep the premises pure. The clean room operates 24/7, with hundreds of whirring machines manufactured by a vast array of different companies.
As orchestrator, imec allows the chip industry’s key players, including tool suppliers, material providers, and users, to harmonize. Startups have difficulty accessing fabs in Asia such as TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer cannot tailor its “design rules” to each request. It does not have the bandwidth to service hundreds of minnows.
This is where imec comes in: it bundles dozens of startups’ requests, allowing TSMC to work many startups through one sales channel and single support funnel. Successful ventures often grow to become direct TSMC customers. As the Chief Operating Officer of a Cambridge UK tech startup, one of this piece’s co-authors benefited from imec. It allowed his company to access the design rules and capacity of TSMC to design a proof-of-concept imaging test chip, needed to demonstrate to investors and potential acquirors.
In CEO Van den hove’s words, imec “short-circuits the traditional value chain.” Instead of an expensive “sequential innovation model” where the design process is spread out across different locations, imec brings them all together into a “networked innovation model.” Key industry players such as Intel and Nvidia believe imec is crucial for their innovations and provide 75% of its funding. “Europe has two jewels,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says. “One is ASML, the most advanced lithography, and the other is imec.”
Imec enjoys a brotherly relationship with the leader of Dutch lithography, ASML. Together, they help form what the Economist describes as “Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley.” Both imec and ASML were launched in 1984 – Dutch is their common home language, and their headquarters are a short hour plus drive apart. They began working together in 1986, with imec providing many of the innovations that allowed ASML to build the world’s most advanced lithography machines, essential to reducing the size of semiconductors. Over the past four decades, imec has grown from 70 to more than 5500 employees, of which 70 to 80% are researchers. More than 100 nationalities work at the Leuven headquarters. Imec employs 800 PhD students from universities other than KUL.
Ties with China are sensitive. In recent years, Belgian authorities deported Chinese researchers at the institution suspected of spying. A decade ago, China represented a growing market for imec. Today, imec only collaborates with Chinese organizations for “non-critical” projects and is “winding them down at a very high speed,” Van den hove says.
With the 2021 EU Chips Act, the European Union aimed to ensure a secure supply of chips and gain a level of self-sufficiency. Imec recently secured €2.5 billion in Chips Act funding. The EU recognizes imec’s position as a global leader in semiconductor R&D, but Van den Hove worries that moving towards European self-sufficiency would disrupt the efficiency of the semiconductor value chain. Instead, he says, the EU should prioritize close collaboration with its geopolitical allies.
Van den hove, an imec lifer, has been on the executive board since 2007. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from KU Leuven and is regarded as an expert on nano-electronics. Under his leadership, imec has expanded its reach into areas such as biomedical research, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.
As AI drives demand for more and bigger data centers, imec develops more power-efficient technology, which will transform imec’s biotech focus. Van den hove describes a looming “explosion of bio-convergence” generating enormous amounts of data that only AI can analyze.
Today, only semiconductor buffs may be aware of imec. Tomorrow, pharmaceutical companies and doctors may consider it just as crucial to pushing the frontiers of knowledge – and a key player keeping the West ahead of China in the global tech race.
Christopher Cytera is a Non-resident senior fellow with the Digital Innovation Initiative at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a technology business executive with more than 30 years of experience in semiconductors, electronics, communications, video, and imaging. His previous startups worked with imec.
Sara Oversteyns is an intern with the CEPA Digital Innovation Initiative. She visited imec in Leuven and took part in the conversation with CEO Luc Van den hove.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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